He crawls.
“Pres—tim—i—on!”
The name emerges as an incoherent gargle. His gullet is stone. His earlobes are stone. His lips are stone. He crawls. His hands sink into the ground. He wrenches them free. He is at the end of his resources. He will perish. This is the finish: he is about to die a slow and hideous death. The gray mantle of the sky is crushing him. He is caught between earth and air. Everything is impossibly heavy. Heavy. Heavy. Heavy. He crawls. He sees only the rough bare soil eight inches from his nose.
Then, miraculously, a gateway appears before him, a shimmering golden oval in the air just ahead of him.
Teotas knows that if he can reach it, he will free himself from this realm of unendurable pressure. But reaching it is a challenge almost beyond his means. Every inch that he gains represents a triumph over implacable forces.
He reaches it. Inch by inch by inch he pulls himself forward, clawing at the ground, digging his nails in and hauling his impossibly heavy body toward that golden gateway, and then it hovers just in front of him, and he puts his hands to its rim and drags himself to his feet, and thrusts one shoulder through, and his head and neck just afterward, and somehow manages to raise one leg and move it across the threshold. And he is through. He feels himself falling, but the drop is only a couple of feet, and he lands all asprawl on a platform of brick and lies there gasping for breath.
His weight is normal, here on the other side. This is the real world out here. He is still asleep, but he senses that he has left his bedroom and is wandering around on some outer parapet of the Castle.
Nothing looks familiar. He sees spires, embrasures, distant towers. He is on a narrow winding path that appears to be going up and up, spi-raling around a tall upjutting outbuilding of the Castle that he cannot even begin to identify. The black sky is speckled with a dazzle of stars, and the cold light of two or three of the moons shines along the horizon. He continues to climb. He imagines that he can hear a dire shrieking wind whipping past the summit of the Mount, though he knows he should not hear any such thing in these privileged altitudes.
The brick pathway that he is following grows ever steeper, ever narrower. The steps are cracked and broken beneath his feet, as though no one has bothered to come up here in centuries and the brickwork has simply been left to erode. It seems to him that he is climbing up the external face of one of the watchtowers along the Castle’s periphery, ascending a terrifying precarious track with an infinitely long drop on either side of him. He grows a little uneasy.
But there is no going back. Following this track is like climbing the spine of some gigantic monster. The path is too narrow here to allow him to turn, and to try to descend it walking backward is inconceivable, so no retreat is possible. Icy sweat begins to trickle down his sides.
He turns a bend in the path and the Great Moon suddenly fills the sky. It is crescent tonight, dazzlingly brilliant, a gigantic bright pair of white horns hanging in front of him. By its frosty blaze he sees that he has clambered out onto a solitary spire of the colossal Castle and has reached a point close to its tip. Far away to his right he sees what he thinks are the rooftops of the Inner Castle. To his left is only a black abyss.
There is no going higher from this position. Nor is there any turning back. He can only stand here shivering on this dizzying upthrust point, whipped by the howling wind, waiting to awaken. Or else he can choose to step out into the emptiness and float downward to whatever awaits him below.
Yes. That is what he will do.
Teotas turns to his left and looks out toward the darkness, and then he puts one foot over the course of bricks that marks the edge of the path, and steps across.
But this is no dream. He is really falling.
Teotas does not care. It is like flying. The cool air from below brushes his hair like a caress. He will fall and fall and fall, a thousand feet, ten thousand, perhaps all the way to the foot of Castle Mount; and when he reaches the bottom, he knows, he will be at peace. At last. Peace.
III
The Book of Powers
1
The Pontifex Prestimion had not been expecting to return to Castle Mount so soon, nor had he anticipated any such sad occasion as the funeral of a brother. Yet here he was once more hastening upriver from the Labyrinth, choking with grief, for Teotas’s burial rites. The ceremony would not be held at the Castle itself, but rather at Muldemar House, the family estate, the place where Teotas had been born and where he would rest now forever beside a long line of his princely ancestors.
It was years since Prestimion had been to Muldemar. There was no real reason for him to visit it. He had often gone there during his days as a prince of the Castle to visit his mother the Lady Therissa, but his accession to the Coronal’s throne had automatically brought her the title and duties of Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and she had been a resident of that island ever since. And likewise Prestimion’s coming to the throne had made Muldemar House his brother Abrigant’s domain, and Prestimion was not eager to overshadow his brother’s authority in his own house.
But then had come the bewildering, agonizing news of Teotas’s death; and Prestimion had come hurrying back to the ancestral home. Abrigant himself, an imposing figure in a dark blue doublet and a cloak striped with black and white, with a yellow mourning badge pinned to his shoulder, greeted him when the Pontifical party arrived at the gateway to Muldemar city. His eyes looked red and raw from sorrow. He was a tall man, the tallest by a head and shoulders of the four brothers who had grown up here together decades ago, and when he wrapped the Pontifex in a close and long embrace it was a well-nigh smothering one.
He released Prestimion and stepped back. “I bid you welcome to Muldemar, brother. Think of this place as being as much your home now as ever it was.”
“You know how grateful I am for those words, Abrigant.”
“And now that you’ve come, we can proceed with our burying.”
Prestimion nodded grimly. “Has there been word from our mother?”
“She sends a warm message of love, and tells us that she joins with us in our grief. But she will not be with us here.”
That news came as no surprise. There had never been any likelihood that the Lady Therissa would attend the ceremony. She was too old now for the arduous journey by sea and land from the Isle of Sleep to Castle Mount, and in any case the distance was so great that she could not have arrived here quickly enough. Abrigant had delayed the rite considerably as it was, in order to make it possible for Prestimion to be there. The Lady Therissa would mourn her youngest son from afar.
Prestimion was startled at how much older Abrigant seemed than when they last had met. That had been at the crowning of Dekkeret, not very long ago. Just as Teotas had, Abrigant had begun very quickly to show his years. He stood a little stoopingly, now. The luster of Abrigant’s glistening golden hair appeared to have dimmed greatly in just the past few months, and the vertical lines of age that had just been beginning to emerge on either side of his nose now seemed very deeply etched. Obviously the death of Teotas had fallen heavily upon him. Abrigant and Teotas, the third son and the fourth, had been extremely close, especially in these recent years when Prestimion’s royal responsibilities had kept him apart from the others.
“We are the only two left now,” Abrigant said, with a kind of wonder in his words, as though he could not believe his own statements. The tone of his voice was dark and sepulchral, like the gusting of a distant wind. “And so strange, so wrong, that our brothers should be dead this young! How old was Taradath when he fell in the Korsibar war? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? And now Teotas, who was younger even than myself, and is gone so much before his time—!”