CHAPTER ONE
MALIGNANT MIRRORS
King Ferenc of Tamlaght was critically reviewing his disintegrating complexion. It would have been an almost geological interest, had the king a scientific bent, which he hadn’t, nor did he have, more specifically, an interest in vulcanology, even though a dozen tiny fumaroles were surfacing among the soft billows of his face like raisins percolating to the surface of a pot of boiling oatmeal. Surrounding them were the fossil craters of last week’s eruptions, some still glowing ruddily. Until recently his cheeks had been as smooth and innocently featureless as his mind.
He didn’t enjoy looking in mirrors as much as he once had—the devices had, it seemed to him, developed a kind of malignancy, though what harm he had ever done them was easily beyond his imagining.
The image in this mirror looked like a kind of watery pudding, which he knew must be altogether a figment of the mirror’s peculiar dislike for him. He knew that he shouldn’t look like a pudding, watery or otherwise, but how and why the palace’s mirrors had taken such a dislike to him was just another among the many mysteries he failed to understand. Much of life always had been a mystery to the king.
He touched a glossy inflammation with a probing fingertip and winced.
He had been depressed and disturbed ever since finally realizing that similar spots that disfigured his sycophantic party guests had been painted onto their expressionless faces. How long had they been doing that?
It was all due to stress, he knew. If there weren’t already enough with which to concern himself, he had just been informed that his quadruply bedamned sister had somehow managed to organize a private army and was at this very moment preparing to invade Tamlaght! Whatever could she be thinking of? Not only her traitorousness but her perversity was only too well illustrated by the fact that she had, without doubt deliberately, chosen that very time of year when he would be most preoccupied with the most important parties, balls and receptions. The country was in a serious depression, both economically and spiritually—something of which even the king was aware, if but dimly—and here he was, anxious and prepared to take upon himself, upon his lone, sloping shoulders, the solemn and weighty burden of maintaining appearances, and now at the same time having to deal with nuisances like his sister Bronwyn. It was just too much!
His collection of wax fruit, at least what remained of it, no longer gripped with the old fascination and he could not count upon the contemplation of those sleek and thuriferous proxies to soothe and divert.
His next favorite preoccupation also had failed: normally he could count upon hours of demandingly satisfying concentration in carefully copying the answers from the backs of crossword puzzle books into the awaiting virgin squares—white, blank and inviting—in neat, precise, laboriously and intently drawn block letters.
Ferenc’s library shelves were full of leather-bound gilt-edged volumes of completed crossword puzzles, arranged by date, that he hoped someday would form the nucleus of a memorial library.
As a last resort he had tried distracting himself by reading but had unfortunately chosen a novel that began with these words:
Dasradelda the beautiful yet innocent maiden, altogether unaware of the fate awaiting her scarcely twenty-four hours in a future that, at the moment, she had no reason to expect to be otherwise than equally as rosy and uneventful as her previous sixteen summers had been, greeted the tall, solemnly clad stranger with her usual radiant, unworldly smile and said, in her dulcet, flutelike voice, ‘Welcome to our humble home, Sir. Is this your first visit to the village of P-- upon the D--?’ ‘No,’ the mysterious apparition replied in a hoarse whisper whose furtiveness was entirely lost upon the ingenuous Dasradelda, while tugging the collar of his black cloak tighter about the lower third of a countenance that lay otherwise concealed within the shadow of a slouch-brimmed hat ‘I was here in 32—.’ Dasradelda felt her bosom heaving at the mention of that fateful date; flushed with embarassmant, she crossed her arms and turned her face away from the stranger. She was used to her bosoms heaving but it annoyed her when they got out of synch.
Ferenc had gotten no further. Where was this village of P-- upon the D--? And why didn’t the author want anyone to know its real name? What difference could it make if anyone did know? Wasn’t it just a story someone had made up? Or was it? He checked the title page and was reassured that it was indeed a novel, written by a Mrs. Alma Gluck, author of Cast Up by the Sea and The Perils of a Primrose. He tried to remember if he had ever heard of any place that sounded like P-- upon the D--, but not only could he not remember, he couldn’t recall ever even having heard of a town called anything upon the anything, so far as that went. He was inspired to check a gazetteer, but while he discovered a village called Preetle upon the Doot, he decided that it surely could not be the one in question since there were only two dashes apiece after the P and the D in the story and there were, respectively, six and three additional letters in the name in the gazetteer. He counted them twice to make sure. Holy Musrum! he muttered to himself, as an appalling thought occurred to him. He let the heavy book fall from his hand as, absolutely stunned by the revelation, he slumped ever further into his armchair. What if the story isn’t taking place in Tamlaght at all? My stars and little fishes! His hand shook as he raised a glass of brandy to his pallid lips and swallowed a fortifying ounce. P-- upon the D-- could be anywhere in the world! The scope of his imagination, so unexpectedly fertile, and the implications it revealed, staggered him. The perils of genius had until now eluded him.
And what was the mystery about the date? Was it important not to know, for example, that the events related took place some time after 3200 yet prior to 3299? And if so, why? And if not so, why not? Was there no end to these questions?
The complicated problems set forth by the involuted literary techniques of The Mystery of the Strabismic Stranger kept the king occupied for days and gave him a renewed, if hushed, respect for those who could readily, and, he thought with a twinge of resentment, easily appreciate the finer points of Literature. Especially the work of such a genius as Mrs. Gluck. He could scarcely wait to see what the next paragraph held in store.
He had only just plunged resolutely into those new complexities when the Great Storm struck. It was to be known in the future even more particularly as the Great Storm of Aught Nine, superseding the Great Storm of Aught Aught as the standard benchmark from which people measured the more common events of their lives. Ah, yes, they would nod with that special knowingness reserved for people who had gone through an extraordinarily vexing hardship, like a shipwreck, the year the cows died and the bank foreclosed on the farm, that would be three years after the Great Storm of Aught Nine, that would be.
The great cyclone was generated by a vast and primeval engine: the frigid, inexorable and elemental energies stored in the pure and irresponsible wastelands north of Fezzara and Mostaza, beyond where the sea was frozen solid to a depth of five hundred feet and reality itself was reduced to its most primordial elements: black and white, heat and cold, light and dark, life and death.
Once or twice a century, perhaps three times if Luck was running perversely, the fragile corral of the Arctic Circle (which was, after all, only an insubstantial geographic convention) failed to contain one of the exuberant, primordial maelstroms that frothed within its compass like a caged and frustrated animal. Breaking its bonds, the cyclone had come whirling out of the north like a stone from a sling. It settled for a time within the great bowl formed by the western part of the North Mostaza Sea, that which was bounded on the west by the island of Guesclin, the south by Londeac and the east by the peninsula of Lesser Piotr. There it surged and furied for a time (and what misadventures it there caused a certain princess will be the subject of a later part of this history). However, the cyclone moved on, eventually, erratically, like an unwinding, precessing top, finally spending itself on the plains of eastern Tamlaght and the burgeoning summer farmlands that the storm, as though it were a damp sponge, wiped as clean as a slate.
At its worst, the cyclone shook the palace like a petulant child shaking its rattle. The wind battered the stone walls while the swollen Slideen River thundered beneath, threatening to overburden the huge culverts that normally allowed the river to pass easily below Palace Island. A depressingly moist miasma penetrated every cubic inch of the interior atmosphere and the king’s spirits became as sodden and pulplike as the pages of the novel he was attempting to read.
He found it almost impossible to concentrate: visions of his sister, the despised Princess Bronwyn, kept drifting across the blurring pages of the book. He snarled and tried to slam the book closed upon her, as he might try to squash a worm that had crawled from the binding. A theatrically apt crash of thunder vibrated the room and Ferenc leaped from his armchair, spilling his brandy, knocking over his side table and tossing his novel into a nearby goldfish bowl where the process of pulpification was completed under the studious, unsurprised gaze of a miniature, overbred carp.
“Oh, damn her!” he cried, exasperated almost to tears. “I wish she’d go to hell!”
“Don’t we all?” replied a suave voice, which caused the king, who had thought he had been alone in the room, to once again leap like a cat discovering static electricity for the first time.
“Oh, Musrum!” he gasped, clutching the breast of his smoking jacket overdramatically. “Must you do that, Payne?”
“Yes,” replied Lord Roelt, helping himself to one of the king’s cigarettes. The slight young man, the same age as the young king (that is to say, in his very early twenties), was a full head shorter and doubtless at least a hundred pounds less massive. Nevertheless, his slim, black-clad presence filled the room to the exclusion of the monarch, in much the same way that the simple flick of the switch on a table lamp can obliterate even the most imposing figures on a motion picture screen.
“This weather is making me a nervous wreck,” said Ferenc, spraying tobacco down his sleeve as he ignited his own cigarette. “My nerves are all atwitter.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but you ought to be thankful for the storm, your Highness.”
“Thankful? Whatever for? I’m miserable! This damned humidity alone is playing havoc with my complexion. Just look at these things on the side of my nose.” Holding his nose to one side with a finger, to display the eruptions to their best advantage, he thrust his face toward his chamberlain’s.
“Yes. Well. Perhaps you can console yourself with this thought: your sister’s little fleet sailed just before the cyclone hit the north coast of Londeac.”
“So?” the king replied, replacing his nose, and pouting a little at Payne’s lack of dermatological (or pehaps geological) curiosity.
“So she’s been at sea in what is probably the worst storm to hit the northern hemisphere since aught aught. I understand that the waves have been mountainous; the coasts on either side of the Strait have had to be evacuated.”
“I think I see what you’re getting at. Not the best sailing weather, eh?”
“What I think is that this storm may be the best possible thing that could’ve happened to us.”
“You’re losing me again.”
“We were always taking a terrible risk in trying to dispatch Bronwyn ourselves. Too many people needed to know of our part in it. Should the people ever have gotten even a hint that the princess’s own brother had a hand in her destruction, let alone myself or Praxx, there would’ve been an insurrection that I very much doubt could’ve been suppressed without annihilating Tamlaght itself. There would’ve been no way for the Privy Council to thwart the barons then. Not that I’d mind that—the destruction of this petty, inbred country that is—but I’m not yet finished with it. If the storm succeeds in eradicating the princess, which I would be surprised if it did not, then not only are all of our problems solved so far as that nuisance is concerned, but we could even conceivably turn it to our advantage: after all, she was preparing to invade Tamlaght with a foreign army.” He blew a series of smoke rings that rose lazily toward the ceiling, ascending through the dank air like bubbles from a contemplative barracuda.
“But do I really have to put up with all of this rain and, and, rain and things? I mean, the ocean is miles from here, I suspect. It’s a little overdone, don’t you think, just to inconvenience one girl?”
“You’d have to ask one of the priests that, your Highness. I wouldn’t know.”
“But all of the priests are in prison!”
“Then you know where to find one, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, that’s true.”
“Take heart, your Highness, in that however miserable you may feel at the moment, that it will pass. Bronwyn’s misery, we can hope, will be indefinitely sustained.”
“That is a comfort, isn’t it? Unless she drowns, of course. Then she couldn’t suffer any longer, could she? That’d be disappointing. In fact, she may already be drowned, mayn’t she? If that’s so, then we’re going through all of this wet and everything for nothing!” He waited to see how Payne would respond to this devastating logic. Payne ignored it.
“Well”, said the chamberlain, “I for one am assuming the worst for her and if that means that she’s already dead, then I believe that thought will be sufficient to sustain me.”
“I suppose. Tell me, Payne, you’ve traveled a bit, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I have, why?”
“Ever been in a town called P-something on the D-something?”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t ring a bell?”
“I have no idea why I even try to hold a conversation with you. But speaking of bells, I must ring for Praxx. I’d almost forgotten.” Payne went to a panel by the door and pulled one of several labeled rings.
“Praxx?” whined Ferenc, sticking out a wet, red lower lip, as though he were a child ejecting a piece of uneaten liver, and slumping into his chair with his arms folded petulantly. “Why him? Aren’t I depressed enough already?”
“It’s necessary.”
“Why is it necessary that I be depressed?”
“No, no. It’s necessary that I talk to Praxx.”
“Then why must you do it here?”
“There are papers for you to sign. It’s an inconvenience, but we still have to have you fulfill that function occasionally. You ought to be pleased that you have some use remaining.”
“Don’t I have enough to do as it is?”
“Splendid weather, isn’t it?” came an unexpected third voice, one that sounded something like a can opener. The king responded with a bleating eep! and dropped his cigarette into the fish’s bowl, who would have regarded this latest imposition with a sneer of disgust if it had possessed the lips to do so.
“I didn’t expect you quite so soon, Praxx,” said Payne coolly.
“I was already on my way here,” replied the general, settling his small, angular frame into one of the king’s overstuffed chairs. He gave a thin sigh. “I haven’t been well lately and this weather makes me feel as though I’m rusting.” He flexed one of his long, thin arms and certainly there was the faintest sound of unoiled metal parts. “I take it you’d just rung for me?”
“Yes…Smoke?” Payne said, offering Ferenc’s silver box of custom-made cigarettes, “The king and I were just discussing the weather. He doesn’t appreciate it as much as you or I.”
“Well, Payne, I wouldn’t be as sanguine about it as you seem to be,” responded the general, lighting his cigarette. The smoke drifting from the nostrils of his perfectly hairless head made him look even more machinelike. “Having experienced the princess’s resiliency, I refuse to get unduly excited until I personally see her bloated, crab-infested corpse.”
“That’s disgusting!” grimaced the king.
“If we find it, I’d like to have my photograph taken with it,” replied Payne. “I’d frame it and put it next to my bed.”
“Oh, Musrum! What a dreadful thought!”
“I’ve brought something for you, your Highness,” said Praxx.
“For me? What’s that?” Ferenc said, immediately forgetting his disgust, eyes brightening at the cheery thought of a surprise gift.
The general handed the king a package by way of answer.
“By Musrum’s hairy nostrils,” squealed Ferenc as he tore away the wrapping. “Crossword puzzles! And from Londeac!”
“The latest edition,” added Praxx.
“Oh, my,” said the king in a hushed voice as he flipped through the thick volume, “There are long words! Really long ones! This will be a challenge. Thank you very much, Praxx.”
The general and Lord Roelt moved to a corner of the room as Ferenc gradually drifted away, oblivious to their presence.
“About the baron?” asked Payne.
“Yes. I thought you’d be wanting some news. His cooperation comes and goes.”
“He didn’t take the death of his daughter at all well.”
“I shouldn’t have supposed he would have. But then, he wasn’t supposed to. What shall we do with him?”
“I doubt that his usefulness has entirely come to an end.”
“Let him stay where he is, then. He can do no harm to anyone while locked up. There’ll be no giants to get him out of this cell.”
A sudden gust of wind vibrated the room, the panes of glass in the tall windows rattled like a tambourine, and the gaslights flickered in the draft. A flash of lightning lit the room with a harsh blue light, thunder immediately following, growling viscerally. “Close those drapes,” ordered Payne. As Praxx, rising with a groan and an audible creaking from his corroded joints, went to do so, Lord Roelt added, “I hope to hell that bitch is drowning.”