"She is a very beautiful woman," Prestimion agreed. "And marvelously well bred, for the child of such a boorish rogue. But I have other matters on my mind than the beauty of women just now, my friend. The Procurator's trial, for one. 'The famines in the war-smitten districts. And also these strange incidents of madness cropping up again and again. This kinsman of Count Fisiolo's, this other Lord Prestimion, who's allowed to go free to terrorize the river! Who's the bigger madman, I wonder, the boy who says he's me, or Fisiolo who tolerates his lunacy? -Come. Let's find a hostelry; and in the morning it's on to Hoikmar, eh? We may discover three Prestimions holding court there!"

"And a couple of Confalumes as well," said Septach Melayn.

From the window of her third-floor bedroom the daughter of Simbilon Khayf followed the three visitors with her eyes as they made their way across the cobbled plaza and into the public park beyond.

There was something unusual about each of them, Varaile thought, that set them apart from most of the men who came here to get money from her father. The one who was so very tall and slender, whose movements were as graceful as a dancer's: he spoke like a bumpkin, but it was plainly only a pretense. In reality he was sharp and quick, that one-you could see it in that piercing blue stare of his, which took in everything at a glance and filed it away for future use. And sly and cunning too; there was a note of mockery underlying everything he said, however straightforward it was meant to seem on the surface-a shrewd and playful and perhaps very dangerous man. And the second one, the big man who had said very little, but spoke with that thick Zimroel accent when he did: how strong he seemed, what a sense of tremendous power under tight restraint he showed! He was like a great rock.

And then, that third man, the short broad-shouldered one. How cornpelling his eyes were! How magnificent his face, though the oddly inappropriate beard and mustache did him no credit. I suspect he would be quite beautiful without them, though, Varaile thought. He is a splendid man. 'There is a lordly presence about him. It is hard for me to believe that such a man is merely a dreary merchant, a grubby manufacturer of accounting devices. He seems so much more than that. So very much more.

They went up the Mount to the ring of Guardian Cities, with Hoikmar as their first stop. 'There, in a public garden abloom with tanigales and crimson eldirons, alongside a quiet canal bordered by short red-tinged grass soft as thanga fur, they encountered a beggar, a ragged and tattered old gray-haired man, who gripped Prestimion's wrist with one hand and that of Septach Melayn with the other and said with a strange urgency in his voice, "My lords, my lords, give me a moment's heed. I have a box of money for sale at a good price. Avery good price indeed."

His eyes were bright with a look of great intensity and even, perhaps, keen intelligence. And yet he wore a beggar's foul rags, torn and stinking . An old pale-red scar crossed the entirety of his left cheek and vanished near the corner of his mouth. Septach Melayn glanced across the top of the man's head to Prestimion and smiled crookedly as though to say, Here we have another sorry madman, I think, and Prestimion, distressed by the thought, nodded solemnly.

"A box of money for sale?" he said. 'What can you mean by that?"

The old man meant just that, apparently. He brought forth from a shabby cloth bag at his waist a rusted strongbox,much encrusted with soil and bound with sturdy straps of faded crumbling leather. Which he opened to reveal that the box was packed to its brim with coins of high denomination, dozens of them, royals and five-royal pieces and a few tens. He dug his gnarled fingers into the horde and stirred the coins about, making a silvery chinking sound. "How pretty they are! And they are yours, my lords, at whatever price you care to pay."

"Look," Septach Melayn said, scooping up one silver piece and tapping it with his fingernail. "Do you see this lettering of antique style at the edge? This is Lord Arioc here, whose Pontifex was Dizimaule."

"But they lived three thousand years ago!" Prestimion exclaimed.

"Somewhat more than that, I think. And who is this? Lord Vildivar, I believe it says. WithMraym's face on the other side."

"And here," said Gialaurys, reaching past Prestimion to pull a coin out of the box, and puzzling over the inscription on it. 'This is Lord Siminave. Do you know of a Siminave?"

"He was Calintane's Coronal, I think," said Prestimion. He looked sternly at the old man. 'There's a fortune in this box! Five hundred royals , at the least! Why would you sell this money to us for a quick price?

You could simply spend the coins one by one and live like a prince for the rest of your life!"

"Ah, my lord, who would believe that a man like me could have amassed a treasure like this? They'd call me a thief, and lock me away forever. And this is very ancient money, too. Even I can see that, though I can't read; for these are strange faces, these Coronals and Pontifexes here. People would be suspicious of money this old. They'd refuse it, not knowing the faces of these kings. No. No. I found the box by a canal, where the rain had washed away the soil. Someone buried it long ago for safe keeping, I suppose, and never returned for it. But it does me no good, my lords, to have such money as this." The old man gnnned slyly, showing a few snaggled teeth. "Give me-ah, let us say two hundred crowns, in money I can spend-give it me in ten-crown pieces, or even smaller coins-and the box is yours to deal with as you wish. For I see that you three are men of consequence, my lords, and will know how to dispose of money of this sort."

"Is a babbling old moon-calf," said Gialaurys, tossing his coin back in the box and tapping his forefinger to his forehead. "No one would refuse good silver royals, however old they be." And SeptachMelayn nodded and smiled and twirled his forefinger in a little circle.

With which opinion Prestimion found himself in agreement. He felt pity for the dirty, bedraggled old man. 'That burning brightness in his gaze was insanity, not intelligence. Surely this was one more dismaying instance of the strange madness that seemed to be polluting the world.

He might indeed be a thief, yes, who had taken these coins from some collector of antiquities. Or, what was more likely from the looks of the box that held them, he really had found them beside the canal. But either way it was a madman's act to be offering them so cheaply, the merest fraction of their true value, to strangers met by happenstance.

Nor did Prestimion want any entanglement in these dealings. How could he, of all people in the world, be party to a transaction by which he bought hundreds of royals' worth of silver from a beggar for a double handful of crowns? He felt a touch of horror at standing this close to madness. Longing profoundly to be gone from this place, he told Septach Melayn to give the man fifty crowns and let him keep the treasure for some other buyer.

The beggar looked astonished as Septach Melayn counted out five ten-crown pieces and passed them across. But he took the money and tucked it in a belt beneath his robe. Then his crafty eyes widened and an expression that might have been fear flashed across his face. "Ah, but one must ever give value for money." He snatched three coins from his own horde. Seizing Prestimion once more by the wrist, the old man pressed them into the palm of his hand, and went scurrying rapidly away, clutching his box of coins to his bony bosom.

"What a strange business," Prestimion said. The sour aroma of the old lunatic's tattered garments lingered after him. He poked gingerly at the ancient coins with his fingertip, turning them from side to side.

"They're odd-looking old things, aren't they? Kanaba and Lord Sirruth, I think we have here, and Guadeloom and Lord Calintane, and this one-no, I can't make these names out at all. Well, no matter. Here, take care of these for me," he said, giving them to Septach Melayn. They moved along. -"Two hundred crowns for the wholebox?" Prestimion said, after a time. "He could have asked twenty times as much. A fool, do you think, or a thief, or a madman?"

"Why not all three?" said Septach Melayn.

Putting the episode from their minds, they spent two days more in languid Hoikmar, drifting about the taverns and markets of that serene lakeside city. Two other troublesome incidents disturbed the tranquility of the visit. A lanky raddled-looking woman with utterly vacant eyes drifted up to Septach Melayn in the main avenue and draped a costly stole of scarlet gebrax hide around his shoulders, murmuring that the Pontifex had instructed her to give it to him. Upon saying which, she turned instantly and lost herself in the busy traffic of the street. And a little later that day, while they were buying a meal of grilled sausages from a Liiman in the city plaza, a well-dressed man of middle years quietly waiting on line behind them, a man who might have been a university professor or the proprietor of a prosperous jewelry boutique, suddenly cried out in a wild voice that the Liiman was selling poisoned meat. Shouldering his way forward, he up-ended the cart onto the pavement , sending hot coals and skewers of half-cooked sausages spraying everywhere about, and went marching furiously away growling to himself 'These were disquieting things. Prestimion's purpose of going out with his companions in disguise had been to see at first hand the other side of Majipoor life, something other than that of the Castle and its gilded lords. But he had not anticipated so much darkness and strangeness, such a welter of irrational behavior.

Had it always been this way out in the cities? he wondered-open displays of madness, public manifestations of the bizarre? Or, as Septach Melayn had some time ago suggested, was all this some sort of aftereffect of the obliteration of the memory of the war upon the minds of the most sensitive and vulnerable citizens? Either way the thought was distasteful. But Prestimion felt particular alarm at the possibility that he himself, by his desire to cleanse in an instant way the wound that the Korsibar insurrection had inflicted on the world, was responsible for this entire epidemic of madness, this strange plague of mental derangement, that appeared to be increasing in virulence from one week to the next.

In Minimool, Hoikmar's neighbor in the Guardian Cities, further signs of such things made themselves manifest. Prestimion found two days there more than sufficient for him.

He had heard that Minimool was a place of distinctive and arresting appearance, but in his present mood he found it oppressively strange: a huddled-together city made up of clumps of tall narrow buildings with white walls and black roofs and tiny windows, crowded one up against another like so many bundles of spears. Steep vertiginous streets that were little more than alleyways separated one clump from the next. And here, too, he heard weird shrill laughter out of open windows high overhead , and saw more than a few people walking in the streets with fixed expressions and glassy eyes, and collided in a doorway with someone in a frantic hurry who burst into gulping breathless sobs as she went sprinting frenetically away.

His sleep was punctuated by troubled dreams as well. In one the beggar with the coin-box from Hoikmar came to him, grinning his evil snaggle-toothed grin, and opened the box and showered him with coins, hundreds of them, thousands, until he was half buried beneath their weight. Prestimion woke, trembling and sweating; but later he slept again, and another dream came, and this time he stood at the edge of a lovely pearly-hued lake at sunrise with Thismet,quietly admiring a sky suffused with pink and emerald streaks, and Simbilon Khayf's darkhaired daughter came up to them out of nowhere and swiftly thrust the silent unresisting Thismet into the water, where she vanished without a trace. This time Prestimion cried out harshly as he awakened, and Septach Melayn, lying on a nearby cot in the hostelry where they were spending the night, reached across and gripped him by the forearm until he was calm.

'There was no more sleep for him that night in Minimool. From time to time strange tremors of distress came over him, and for a moment, just before dawn, it seemed to him almost as though the general madness were reaching up and engulfing him with its dread contagion.

Then he brushed the feeling aside. It would not touch him, whatever it might be. But 0! The people! The world!

I have had enough of this tour, I think," Prestimion said in the morning . "Today we return to the Castle."

Plainly much was amiss out there in the world of everyday life; and Presfimion, once he was back, gave orders for the planning for his official visit to the cities of the Mount to be accelerated. No more skulking around in false whiskers and shabby costumes, not now. In the full panoply of the Coronal Lord he would go forth to six or seven of the most important cities among the Fifty, and confer with dukes and counts and mayors, and take the measure of the crisis that seemed to be enveloping the world with such rapidity here in the opening months of his reign.

First, though, the problem of Dantirya Sambail's continued captivity needed a resolution of some sort.

He paid a call on the magus Maundigand-Klimd, who by now had established his headquarters in a group of vacant rooms on the far side of the Pinitor Court that had been the apartmentof Korsibar before his seizure of the throne. Prestimion had expected to find the place filled by this time with all the arcane gear of the sorcerer's trade, astrological charts on the walls, and heaps of mysterious leather-bound folios full of magical lore, and enigmatic mechanical instruments of the sort he had seen in the chambers of Gominik Halvor, the master of wizardry with whom he had studied the dark arts during his time in Triggoin: phalangaria and ambivials, hexaphores and ammatepilas, armillary spheres and astrolabes and alembics, and all of that.

But there were none of those things here. Prestimion saw just a few small unimportant-looking devices laid out in indifferent order on the upper shelves of a simple unpainted bookcase that was otherwise empty. Their nature was unknown to him; they might easily have been calculating machines or other items of prosaic arithmetical function, not very different from those that Prestimion had pretended to deal in when he was in Stee. Or the cheap little geomantic devices that he had seen for sale in the midnight market of Bombifale, that night when he first had met Maundigand-Klimd, and which the Su-Suheris had scornfully dismissed as fraudulent and worthless. Maundigand-Klimdwas not likely to have such things here, Prestimion decided. He was surprised by such sparseness, though.

Maundigand-Klimd had furnished the apartment only in the most stark and minimal way. In the main room Prestimion saw a sleeping harness of the sort used by the Su-Suheris folk, and a couple of chairs for the benefit of human visitors, and a small table on which a handful of books and leaflets of little apparent significance lay casually strewn.

There seemed to be little, if anything, in the rooms beyond, and throughout the place the ancient stone walls were altogether bare of ornament.

'The effect was sterile and chilling.

"This was a troubled trip for you, I think," the magus said at once.

"You can see that, can you?"

"One scarcely needs to be a master of the mantic arts to see that, your lordship."

Prestimion smiled grimly. "It's that apparent? Yes. I suppose it is. I saw things I'd rather not have seen, and dreamed things I'd have been better off not dreaming. It's exactly as I was told: there's madness out there, Maundigand-Klimd. Much more of it than I had supposed there to be."

Maundigand-Klimd replied with his disconcerting doublenod, but made no other response.

'ffiere were some who walked as though asleep in the streets, or laughed to themselves, or cried or screamed," Prestimion said. "Akinsman of Count Fisiolo in Stee calls himself Lord Prestimion, and randomly sinks boats that he meets along the river for his own pleasure. In Hoikmar-" He had with him the three coins that the beggar had pressed into his hand, and, remembering them now, he brought them out and laid them before Maundigand-Klimd. "I had these of a poor sad crazy old man there, who came upon us all eager to sell us a rusty box heavy with good silver royals for a handful of crowns. Look you, Maundigand-Klimd: these coins are thousands of years old. Lord Sirruth, this is, and Lord Guadeloom, and here-"

The Su-Suheris set the three coins out in a precise row in the palm of his own gaunt white hand. The left head gave Prestimion a quizzical look. "You bought the whole box of them, did you, my lord?"

"How could I? But we gave him a little money for charity's sake, and he forced these three on us in return, and turned and fled."

"He was not so mad as you suppose, I think. And you did well not to make him an offer. These coins are false."

"False?"

Maundigand-Klimd placed one hand over the other, closing the coins between, and held them that way for a time. "I can feel the vibration of their atoms," he said. "These coins have cores of bronze, and just a thin wash of silver over them. I could easily scrape through to the base metal with my fingernail. How likely is it that Lord Sirruth's ten-royal pieces had bronze cores?" Ile Su-Suheris handed back the coins.

"There are madmen galore roaming the world, my lord, but your poor old man of Hoikmar is not one of them. A simple swindler is all he is."

"There's some comfort in that," Prestimion said, in as light a tone as he could manage just then. "At least there's one out there who still has his wits! -But where's all this madness coming from, do you suppose?

Septach Melayn says it may be connected with the obliteration. That there's a vacuum in people's minds where the memories of the war once were, and strange things go rushing in when vacuums are created .".

"I find a degree of wisdom in that notion, my lord. On a certain day some months past I felt what I thought of as an emptiness entering me, though I had no idea of its cause. As it happened I was strong enough to withstand its effects. Others evidently are not so fortunate."

A pang of guilt and shame seared through Prestimion at the Su-Suheris sorcerer's words. Could it be? Was the whole world to be infected with madness because of his spur-of-the-moment decision on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge?

No, he thought. No. No. No. Septach Melayn's theory is wrong.

These are isolated, random instances. A world of many billions of people will always have a great many madmen among those billions. It is only coincidence that so much of this is coming to our attention just now.

" Be that as it may," Prestimion said, pushing back his discomfort, "we'll look into the truth of it at some other time. Meanwhile: I'll shortly be leaving the Castle again for some weeks, or even months, to make formal visits to several of the cities of the Mount. The unfinished matter of Dantirya Sambail has to be dealt with before I go."

"And what is your pleasure, my lord?"

"You spoke not long ago of giving him back his memory of the civil war," Prestimion said. "Can such a thing actually be done?"

"Any spell can be reversed by the one who cast it."

"It was Heszmon Gorse of Triggoin, and his father Gominik Halvor.

But they have gone off to their home in the north, and would be many weeks in returning if I summoned them back now. And in any case they themselves no longer have any inkling of what it was I asked them to do."

A flicker of surprise crossed Maundigand-Klimd's faces. "Is that so, my lord?"

"The obliteration was complete, Maundigand-Klimd. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and I were the only ones excepted from it. And since the day it was done you are the only one who's been told that it happened."

"Ah."

"I'm not eager to allow knowledge of it into the possession of anyone else, not even Gominik Halvor and his son. But Dantirya Sambail was the prime agent of the usurpation, and for that he has to be punished, and it's evil to punish a man for something he doesn't know he's done. I want to see some shred of remorse from him before I pronounce sentence . Or some awareness, at the very least, that he deserves what I intend to impose on him. Tell me this, Maundigand-Klimd: could you undo the obliteration in him?"

The Su-Suhefis took a moment to reply.

"Quite probably I could, my lord."

"You hesitated. Why?"

"I was contemplating the consequences of doing such a thing, and I saw-well, certain ambiguities."

Prestimion gave him a puzzled frown. "Make yourself perfectly clear, Maundigand-Klimd."

Another brief pause. "Do you know how I see into the future, my lord?"

"How could I possibly know that?"

"Let me explain it, then." 'The Su-Suheris touched his right hand to his right forehead, and then to the other one. "Alone among all intelligent species of the known universe, my lord, my race is constructed with a double mind. Not a double identity, despite our custom of carrying a pair of names apiece; merely a double mind. One self divided between two brain-cases. I may speak with this mouth or that, as I please; I may turn this head, or that one, to observe something; but I am a single self none the less. Each brain has the capacity to carry on an independent train of thought. But they are also capable of joining in a united effort."

"Indeed," said Prestimion, scarcely understanding at all, and mystified by where this might be heading.

"Do you think, lordship, that our insight into things to come is brought about by fighting incense and muttering incantations, invoking demons and dark forces, and such? No, my lord. That is not how it is done by us.

Such folk as the geomancers of Tidias may rely on such methods, yes, their bronze tripods and colored powders, their chanting, their spells. But not us." He passed one hand, long fingers outspread, beforeboth his faces.

'We establish a linkage between one mind and the other. A vortex, if you will: a whirlpool of tension as the neural forces meet and swirl round each other. And in that vortex we are thrust forward along the river of time. We are given glimpses of what lies ahead."

"Reliable glimpses?"

"Usually, my lord."

Prestimion tried to imagine what it was like. "You see actual scenes of the future? The faces of people? You hear the words they speak?"

"No, nothing like that," said Maundigand-Klimd. "It's far less concrete and specific, my lord. It is a subjective thing, a matter of impressions , inferences, subtle sensations, intuitions. Insight into probabilities . There's no way I could make you really understand. One must experience it. And that-"

"Is impossible for someone who has only one head. All right, Maundigand-Klimd. At least it sounds rational to me. You know I have a bias in favor of rationality, don't you? I'm not truly comfortable with the sorcery of incantations and aromatic powders, and I don't expect I ever will be. But there's an aspect of science, or something like science, in what you say. A telepathic communion of your two minds-a temporal vortex, a whirlpool that carries your perceptions forward in timethat's easier for me to swallow than the whole superstitious rigmarole of armnatepilas and pentagrams and magical amulets. -So tell me, Maundigand-Klimd: What do you see, when you cast the auguries for restoring the Procurator's lost memories?"

Again that little moment of hesitation. "A multitude of forking paths."

"I can see that much myself," Prestimion said. "What I need to know is where those paths lead."

"Some, to complete success in all your endeavors. Some to trouble.

Some to great trouble. And then there are some whose destinations are utterly unclear."

"This is not helpful, Maundigand-Klimd."

'There are sorcerers who will tell a prince whatever he wishes to hear. I am not one of those, my lord."

"I understand that, and I'm grateful for it." Prestimion let out his breath in a soft whistling sound. -"Give me a reasonable assessment of risk, at least. I feel the moral necessity of making Dantirya Sambail's mind intact again as a prerequisite to passing sentence on him. Do you see anything inherently dangerous in that?"

"Not if he remains your prisoner until the sentence is carried out, my lord," said Maundigand-Klimd.

"You're certain of that?"

"I have no doubt."

'Well, then. 'That sounds good enough for me. Let's go to the tunnels and pay him a little visit."

The Procurator was in a far less amiable mood than on the occasion of his last interview with Prestimion. Obviously the additionalweeks of confinement had told on his patience and temper: there was nothing in the least affable or jovial about the basilisk glance that he gave Prestimion now. And when the Su-Suheris entered his cell a moment after the Coronal, stooping low to negotiate the arching entrance, Dantirya Sambail looked altogether vitriolic.

Along with rage, though, there seemed to be a certain expression of fear in his amethyst-hued eyes. Prestimion had never before seen the slightest flicker of dismay on the Procurator's features: he was a man of utter self-confidence, ever in command of his soul. But the sight of Maundigand-Klimd appeared to have shaken that command now.

"What is this, Prestimion?" Dantirya Sambail asked acidly. 'Why do you bring this alien monstrosity into my lair?"

"You do him an injustice with such harsh words," said Prestimion.

'This is Maundigand-Klimd, high magus to the court, a man of science and learning. He's here to repair your injured mind, cousin, and bring you back to full consciousness of certain deeds that have been stripped from your recollections."