“It never for an instant occurred to me that she’d place remaining as lady-in-waiting to Varaile above her husband’s chance to hold a position at the Castle that’s second only to my own. Meanwhile Septach Melayn has already taken himself off to the Labyrinth to be Prestimion’s High Spokesman and the post of High Counsellor goes unfilled here.—Teotas looks like a wreck, besides. All of this must be pulling him apart.”
“He looks very bad, yes,” Dinitak agreed. “But it’s my belief that his problem with Fiorinda is not the only thing that’s at work on him.”
“What are you saying? What else is going on?”
Dinitak’s gaze rested squarely on Dekkeret. “Teotas has sought my company more than once, recently. I think you know that he and I have never had much to do with each other. But now he is in pain and crying out for help, and he dares not go to you because of this High Counsellor business, for which he sees no resolution. So he has come to me instead. Hoping, perhaps, that I will speak to you about him.”
“As you are now doing. But what kind of help can I provide? You say he’s in pain. But if a man can’t make up his own mind about something as important as the High Counsellorship—”
“This has nothing to do with the High Counsellorship, my lord. Not in any direct way.”
Dekkeret, mystified and growing impatient now, said sharply, “Then what else can it be?”
“He is receiving sendings, Dekkeret. Night after night, the most terrible dreams, the most agonizing nightmares. It has reached the point where he’s afraid to allow himself to sleep.”
“Sendings? Sendings are benevolent things, Dinitak.”
“Sendings of the Lady, yes. But these are not from her. The Lady does not send dreams of monsters and demons who chase people across a blasted landscape. Nor does the Lady send you dreams that convince you of your own total worthlessness and make you believe that every act of your life has been fraudulent and contemptible. He says that some nights he awakens actually despising himself. Despising.”
Dekkeret began to toy fretfully with his papers again. “Teotas should see a dream-speaker, then, and get his head cleared around. By the Divine, Dinitak, this is maddening! I offer the most important post in my government to a man who seems to me to be eminently qualified for it, and now I discover that he can’t accept it because his wife won’t let him, and that he’s all in a fluster over a few bad dreams besides—! Well, it’s simple enough. I’ll retract my offer and Teotas can go scuttling down to the Labyrinth to be with Fiorinda. Maybe old Dembitave wants to be High Counsellor. Or perhaps I can drag Abrigant up here from Muldemar to take the job. Or else I suppose I can ask one of the younger princes, Vandimain, perhaps—”
“My lord,” said Dinitak, cutting in brusquely, “I remind you that I said Teotas was receiving sendings.”
“Which is a statement that makes no sense to me.”
“What I mean is that someone is thrusting these terrible dreams into the mind of Teotas from afar. You continue to think that the Lady of the Isle is the only person in the world with the capacity to enter someone’s sleeping mind.’’
“Well? Isn’t that so?”
“Do you remember a certain helmet, Dekkeret, a little thing of metal mesh, that my late father used on you long ago when you were trekking with us through the Desert of Stolen Dreams in Suvrael? Do you recall a later version of the same device that I myself used in your presence, and Lord Prestimion used also, when we were fighting against the rebel Dantirya Sambail? That helmet gives one the capacity to enter minds at a great distance. Prestimion himself could confirm that, if you were to ask him.”
“But those helmets and all the documents associated with their construction and operation are kept under lock and key in the Treasury of the Castle. No one’s been near those things in years. Are you trying to tell me that they’ve been stolen?”
“Not at all, my lord.”
“Then why are we discussing them?”
“Because of the dreams Teotas is having.”
“All right. So Teotas is having very bad dreams. That’s not a trivial thing. But dreams, in the end, are just dreams. We generate them out of the darkness of our own souls, unless they’re put into us from outside, and the only one who’s able to do that is the Lady of the Isle. Who certainly would never send anyone dreams of the sort that you say Teotas is getting. And you yourself have just agreed that we control the only other machine that can do such a thing, which is the helmet that your father used to use.”
“How sure can you be,” Dinitak asked, “that the devices you keep locked in the Treasury are the only ones in existence? I am familiar with the workings of the helmet, lordship. I know what it can do. What is happening to Teotas is the sort of thing it can do.”
For the first time Dekkeret began to see where Dinitak had been trying this whole while to lead him. “And just who is it, do you think, who owns this other helmet and is bedeviling poor Teotas with it?”
A gleam came into Dinitak’s eyes. “My father’s younger brother Khaymak was the mechanic who constructed my father’s mind-controlling helmets for him. Khaymak has remained in Suvrael all these years, going about whatever slippery business it is that he goes about. But you may recall that he turned up on Castle Mount only last year—”
“Of course,” said Dekkeret. “Of course!” It was all starting to fall into place now.
“Turned up on Castle Mount,” Dinitak continued, “seeking to enroll himself in the service of Lord Prestimion. I myself saw to it—disliking the embarrassment, I will admit, of having such an unsavory kinsman around the place—that he was denied permission to come anywhere near the Castle. I see now that this was a huge mistake.”
“You think that he’s built another helmet?”
“Either that, or he’s designed one and was searching for a patron who would finance the construction of a working model. I was fairly sure that that was why he was coming to Prestimion; and I saw nothing good coming from any of that, and so the gates of the Castle were closed to him. But I think he’s found a patron somewhere else, and has fashioned a new helmet by now, and is using it on Teotas. And, it could be, on many others as well.”
Dekkeret felt a chill.
“Just before my coronation,” he said slowly, “Prestimion’s Su-Suheris magus came to me and told me that he had had some sort of vision in which some member of the Barjazid clan somehow made himself a Power of the Realm. The whole thing seemed nonsensical to me, and I put it out of my mind. I never said anything to you about it because to me it carried treasonous implications, that you might be thinking of overthrowing me and making yourself Coronal in my place, which seemed too absurd even to think about.”
“I am not the only Barjazid in this world, my lord.”
“Indeed. And Maundigand-Klimd cautioned me against interpreting his vision too literally. But what if it meant, not that this Barjazid was going to become a Power—and what other Power could he become, if not Coronal?—but that he was going to attain power, power in the general sense of the word?”
“Or that he was going to sell his helmet and his services to some other person who would wield that power,” Dinitak said.
“But who would that be? The world’s at peace. Prestimion dealt with all our enemies years ago.”
“The poison-taster of Dantirya Sambail still lives, my lord.”
“Mandralisca? I haven’t so much as thought of him in years! Why, he must be an old man now—if he’s still alive at all.”
“Not so old, I think. Perhaps fifty, at most. And still quite dangerous, I suspect. I touched his mind with mine, you know, when I wore the helmet the day of that final battle in the Stoienzar. Only briefly, but it was enough. I will never forget it. The hatred coiled within that mind like a giant serpent—the anger aimed at all the world, the lust to injure, to destroy—”