What I practice is the true magic, which is a form of science. I have as much contempt for the other sort as you do, which is why I brought you these things today."

"Thinking that I'll issue an ordinance prohibiting them? I can't do that, Maundigand-Klimd. It's never wise to try to legislate against people's irrational beliefs."

"I understand that, lordship. I only wanted to call to your attention the fact that the madness is bringing forth a secondary level of insanity, ich in itself will have harmful consequences for your reign."

"If I knew what needed to be done, I'd be doing it."

"Beyond doubt that is so."

"But what-what? Is there anything you can suggest?"

"Not at this moment, my lord."

Prestimion detected a curious inflection in Maundigand-Klimd's voice, as though he might be leaving something ofsignificance unspoken . Prestimion stared up at the two heads, at the four opaque green eyes. The Su-Suheris was an invaluable counsellor, and even, to a degree, a cherished friend. There were times, though, when Prestimion found Maundigand-Klimd unreadable, incomprehensible, and this was one of them. If there was some hidden subtext here, he was uncertain of what it was.

But then one possibility presented itself to him. It was a disagreeable one, but it needed to be pursued.

He said, "You and I have already discussed Septach Melayn's notion that the madness has been caused by the world-wide obliteration of memory that I imposed, the day of the victory over Korsibar at Thegomar Edge. I think you know that I'm reluctant to accept that the99 ory, "Yes. my lord. I do."

"I can tell from the way you say it that you don't agree with me. What are you holding back, Maundigand-Klimd? Do you have certain knowledge that I did bring the madness on that way?"

"Not certain knowledge, my lord."

"But you think it's very probable, do you?"

All this while it had been Maundigand-Klimd's left head, usually the more loquacious of the pair, that had been speaking.But it was the other one that replied now: "Yes, my lord. Very probable indeed."

Prestimion closed his eyes a moment, drew in his breath sharply.

'The blunt statement came as no surprise. In recent weeks he had been veering more and more, in his own thoughts, toward the likelihood that he and he alone was responsible for the new darkness that had begun to descend upon the world. But it stung him deeply, all the same, to have the shrewd and capable Maundigand-Klimd lend his support to that idea.

"If the madness was caused by magic," he said slowly, "then it can only be healed by magic, would you not say?"

' That could be so, my lord."

"Is what you're telling me, then, that one possible way to fix things is to call Heszmon Gorse and his father down out of Triggoin, and all the rest of the mages who took part in casting the spell that day, and have them cast a reverse spell that would restore everyone's knowledge of the civil war?"

Maundigand-Klimd hesitated, something that Prestimion had rarely seen him do.

"I am not sure, my lord, that such a thing would be effective."

"Good. Because it's never going to happen. I'm nothappy about the apparent consequences of what I did, but it's a safe bet that I'm not going to try anything like it again. Among other things, I don't have any desire to let everyone know that their new Coronal began his reign by hoodwinking the entire planet into thinking his accession had been peaceful. But also I see great risks in suddenly restoring the old sequence of events. People have spent the past couple of years living with the false history that I had my mages instill in their minds at the end of the civil wan For better or worse, they accept it as the truth. If I take all that away now, it might just cause an upheaval even worse than what's going on now. What do you say about that, Maundigand-Klimd?"

"I agree completely,"

'Well, then: the problem remains. 'There's a plague loose in the world, and a lot of bad magic is springing up as a result, a mess of chicanery and fraud which you and I both despise." Prestimion, glowering at the little ceramic heads that Maundigand-Klimd had spilled all over his desk, began to scoop them back into their sack. "Since the plague was brought on by magic, it needs to be dealt with by a countermagicgood magic, true magic, as you say. Your kind of magic. Very well.

Please work something out, my friend, and tell me what it is."

"Oh, Lord Prestimion, if only it were that easy!But I will see what I can do."

The Su-Suheris went out. Prestimion, when he was gone, fished about in the sack until he had found the Lord Prestimion head and the Septach Melayn, and dropped them in a pocket of his tunic.

Septach Melayn was waiting for him in the gymnasium, restlessly pacing up and down and flicking his baton through the air, bringing an ominous hum from the slender wand of nightflower wood at every motion of his supple wrist. "You're late," he said. He pulled a second baton from the rack and tossed it to Prestimion. "A lot of important decrees to sign this morning, was it?"

"A visit from Maundigand-Klimd," said Prestimion, laying the baton aside and drawing the little heads from their pocket. "He brought me these. Charming, aren't they?"

"Oh, indeed! Your portrait and mine, if I'm not mistaken. What are they meant for?"

"Amulets to conjure with. To keep the madness away, supposedly.

Maundigand-Klimd tells me that the midnight market's full of stuff like this, all of a sudden. They're selling the way sausages would in the middle of the Valmambra. He bought a whole bag of them. Not just your face and mine, but all sorts, even a Ghayrog and a Hjort and a Su-Suheris . Something for everyone. All the old cults are starting up again, too, he says: big business all over again for the whole magus crowd."

"A pity," said Septach Melayn. He took the portrait of himself from Prestimion and balanced it in the palm of his hand. "A little on the grisly side, I'd say. But so cleverly done! Look, I'm grinning and shrieking at one and the same time. And I seem to be winking a little, too. I'd love to meet the artist who designed it. Perhaps I could get him to do a fullscale portrait, you know?"

"You are a madman," said Prestimion.

"You may very well be right. May I keep this?"

"If it amuses you."

"It certainly does. And now, please, my lord, pick up your baton. Our exercise hour is long overdue. On your guard, Prestimion! On your guard!"

At the beginning of the week following, word was brought to Prestimion as he breakfasted that his brother Abrigant had returned to the Castle from the south-country in the middle of the night, and was requesting immediate audience.

Prestimion had arisen at dawn. The hour was not much past that now. Varaile still slept; Abrigant must not have been to bed at all. Why such urgency?

'Tell him that I'll meet with him in the Stiamot throne-room in thirty minutes," Prestimion said.

Hardly had he settled into his seat there when Abrigant came bursting in, looking as though he had not taken the trouble even to change is clothing since his arrival. He was bronzed and weatherworn from his travels, and the brown cloak that he wore above threadbare green leggings was patched and soiled. Over his left cheekbone there was a bruise of considerable size, plainly not a recent one but still quite livid.

"Well, brother, welcome back to---2' Prestimion began, but he got no further along than that with his greeting.

"Married, are you?" Abrigant blurted. His expression was fierce and challenging. "For that is what I hear, that you've taken a queen. Who is she, Prestimion? And why didn't you wait until I couldattend the ceremony?"

' These are very straightforward words when spoken to a king by his younger brother, Abrigant."

"There was a time once when I made a grand starburst to you and a deep bow, and you told me that that was much too much obeisance between brother and brother. Whereas now-"

"Now you go too far in the other direction. We haven't seen each other for many months; and here you are, charging in like a wild bidlak, not even a smile or a friendly embrace, immediately asking me to explain my actions to you as though you were Coronal and I a mere-"

Again Abrigant cut him off. 'The groom who received me when I arrived told me that you have a consort now, and that her name is Varaile. Is this true? Who is this Varaile, brother?"

"She is the daughter of Simbilon Khayf."

If Prestimion had struck him across the face, Abrigant would not have looked more astounded. He recoiled visibly. "The daughter of Simbilon Khayf ? The daughter of Simbilon Khayf? That puffed-up arrogant fool is a member of our family now, Prestimion? Brother, brother, what have you done?"

"Fallen in love, is what I've done. What you've done is to behave like a belligerent boor. Calm yourself, Abrigant, and let'sbegin this conversation again, if you will. -The Coronal Lord welcomes the Prince of Muldemar to the Castle after his long journey, and bids him be seated.

Sit there, Abrigant. There. Good. I don't like to have people looming up over me, you know." Abrigant seemed totally nonplussed, but Prestimion could not tell whether it was from the rebuke or from his bland admission of having married Simbilon Khayf's daughter. "You look as though you've had an arduous trip. I hope it was a fruitful one."

"Yes, it was. Very much so." Abrigant's words came as if through clenched teeth.

'Tell me about it, then."

But Abrigant would not be turned from his course. "This marriage, brother-"

Summoning all the patience he could manage, Prestimion said, "She is a splendid queenly woman. You'll not doubt the wisdom of my choice when you meet her. As for her father, I assure you that I'm no more enamored of him than you are, but there's no cause for dismay. He's caught the madness thaf s running about the world, and has been locked away where he can't offend anyone with his vulgar ways. In the matter of my not holding the wedding off until yougot back here, I shouldn't have to justify that to you; but I ask you to bear in mind that I had no assurance you'd keep your promise about giving up your quest for Skakkenoir within six months. For all I knew, you'd be gone two or three years-or forever."

"You had my solemn pledge. Which I kept to the very letter of the word. It was six months exactly from the day we parted that I began my homeward trip."

'Well, you have my gratitude for that, at least. The expedition was successful, you say?"

"Oh, yes, Prestimion. Quite successful. I have to tell you that it would have been a far greater success if you hadn't sworn me to that sixmonth limit, but there's much to report even so. -He's really gone mad, has he? A raving imbecile, eh? What a perfect fate for him! I hope you've got him chained up among all those hideous beasts Gialaurys brought back from Kharax for you."

"You said there was much to report," Prestimion reminded him. "It would be kind of you to begin, brother."

He had commenced the trip, Abrigant said-still obviously thunderstruck by the news of Prestimion's marriage, but making a visible effort to put it out of mind-by heading eastward from Sippulgar along the Aruachosian coast of the Inner Sea. But that was such a vile sweltering place, where the air was so wet and thick that one could hardly breathe, and the wasps and ants were the size of mice and the very worms had wings and jaws, that they were driven inland soon after crossing over into the province of Vrist. The last glimpse of the sea that they had was at the dreary Vristian port of Glystrintai; after that, they found themselves in much less humid country, largely uninhabited-a hot, primordial-looking plateau of wrinkled crags and congealed lava, of pink lakes in which gigantic snakes lay coiled, of turbulent riversinhabited by monstrous sluggish mud-colored fish, bigger than a man, that seemed to have wandered out of a much earlier era.

In this sun-baked prehistoric land of broad vistas and distant horizons a terrible silence prevailed day after day, broken only by the occasional skreeking cries of sinister-looking predatory birds, bigger even than the khestrabons or surastrenas they had seen in the east-country, that went soaring by high overhead. The travelers felt almost as though they were the first explorers of some virgin planet.

But then they spied smoke on the horizon--campfires-and they came the next day to a land of jet-black hills laced with dazzling outcrops of brilliant white quartz, where thousands of Liimen living in the middle of nowhere were mining gold. "Frue gold this time?" said Prestimion. "After golden bees and golden hills and walls of golden stone, a place where the actual metal itself is found?"

'The metal itself," Abrigant said. "These are the mines of Sethem province, where naked Liimen work like slaves under the murderous sun. Here. See for yourself." And he reached into a burlap knapsack that he had brought into the throne-room with him and pulled forth three square thin plates of gold, each about the sizeof the palm of his hand, on which geometric symbols had been marked with punches.

"They gave me these," said Abrigant. "I don't know what they're worth.

The miners didn't seem to care. They just do their work, as though they were machines."

"I'lie mines of Sethem," Prestimion said. "Well, the stuff had to come from somewhere. I never gave it a thought."

The image came to him of long lines of Liimen at work in that barren stony landscape: strange uncomplaining rough-skinned beings, with broad flat heads shaped like hammers and three fiery eyes glowing like smouldering coals in the craters of their deeply recessed eye-sockets.

Who had assembled them and brought them there? What thoughts went through their minds as they plodded through their days of unthinkable toil?

The gold lay hidden in the quartz, the merest dusting of it scattered thinly through the rocky veins. The Liimen mined it, Abrigant said, by building fires on the black stony outcrops and hurling cold water and vinegar against the heated rock to fracture it so that the ore could be extracted from the fissures thus created. Some worked on the surface of the hills, others in deep tunnels that were too low-roofed for them to stand in, so that they had to writhe along the ground, seeing their way with lamps fastened to their foreheads. Eventually great mounds of orebearing rock were collected. Then a different group would set to work with stone sledgehammers to break that up into smaller pieces, which yet other workers took and ground down in mills operated by great handles , two or three Liimen to a handle, until it came to the consistency of flour.

The final phase was to spread the processed quartz out on slanting boards and pour water over it to flush away the dross, a task repeated again and again until only pure particles of gold remained. This then was smelted for days on end in a kiln, along with salt and tin and hoikka bran, and eventually pure gleaming nuggets came forth, which were beaten into the thin plates that Abrigant had been given.

"It is miserable work in a miserable place," he said. "But they toil every hour of the day, handling an immense amount of rock to produce very little gold. And all that labor just for the sake of gold! If only there were more of the stuff, perhaps we could find some way to convert it into useful iron or copper. But as it is, we have just this, suited only for trifling decorative purposes."

"And after Sethem," Prestimion said, "where did you go then?"

"Eastward still," replied Abrigant, "into the province of Kinorn, which was not quite a land of deserts but far from pleasant, having been folded again and again by ancient movements of the land so that crossing it was like crossing a giant griddle. We went on and on, ridge after ridge, and there was always the next steep ridge to climb, and we were tossed about in our floaters as though in a storm at sea. This bruise, Prestimion-I struck my head once when our car overturned and thought it would be my death. Some villages had been founded here, too, the Divine only knew why, where the people lived by farming and seemed to have very little knowledge of the great world beyond. They spoke a dialect that was diffiL , -It to understand. Zimroel was only a myth to them, and its demonic Procurator unknown; they claimed to know of such places as the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount and Alaisor and Stoien and Sintalmond and Sisivondal, but it was obvious that their information went no farther than those cities'mere names. I asked of Skakkenoir, though, and they smiled at that, and said, yes, yes, Skakkenoir, and pointed east. They pronounced the name in a barbarous way that I could never get my tongue to imitate; but the soil there, they said, was bright red. 'The red of iron, Prestimion."

"Of course, the six-month limit expired precisely at that point," said Prestimion lightly, "and therefore you turned back without investigating any further."

"You knew it, brother! 'That is what happened. But in fact we were actually a few days short of the six months, sowe went on a little way.

And look, Prestimion!" He put his hand into the knapsack again, taking from it three little glass vials of red sand, and a fourth that contained the dried and crumbling leaves of some plant. "Have this sand analyzed, and I think you'll find them rich with iron, as much as one part in ten thousand. And the leaves: can these be from the metal-bearing plants of Skakkenoir? I think they are, Prestimion. It was only a small strand of red earth, twenty feet wide at most and soon petering out-one little accidental tongue jutting forth out of the land of Skakkenoir, I think.

And half a dozen scraggly little plants growing on that red soil. The real wealth lay still to the east, of that I was sure. But of course I was sworn to turn back on the day the seventh month began, and that day had now arrived, and so I did. I came very close, I believe. But I was sworn to turn back."

"All right, Abrigant. You've made your point."

Prestimion opened the vial of leaves and lifted one out. It looked like nothing more than a dried leaf, such as one would use as a cooking herb. There was nothing metallic about it: one might do better, perhaps, trying to extract gold from the shining shrubs on the hills of Arvyanda that reflected the gold of the sunlight than to get iron from this little wrinkled brown scrap of vegetation. But he would have it analyzed, all the same.

'There you are," said Abrigant. "The mines of Skakkenoir are yours for the taking. It is such ugly country, Prestimion, and so forbidding in its heat and its up-and-down landscape: I can see why other explorers gave up too soon. But perhaps they weren't as eager as I was to find the land of iron. The great prosperity of the age of Prestimion, brother, is in those four vials."

"May that truly be so. *111 have them examined this very day. But even if they prove to bear iron, what then? A bit of red sand and a few leaves won't take us very far. Skakkenoir itself remains undiscovered."

"It lay just beyond the next hill, Prestimion! I swear it!"

"Ah, but did it, though?"

Abrigant gave him a stormy look. "I would go again and see. With bigger floaters and a great many more men. And no six-month deadlines , this time. It's a ghastly land, but I would go, if only you'll authorize a second expedition. And I'll bring back all the iron you would ever want to possess."

"First the chemical analysis of these little samplesof yours, brother.

And then we'll discuss a new expedition."

Abrigant seemed to be on the verge of some hot retort; but just then came a knock at the door, the little rat-tat-tat pattern that Prestimion recognized as Varaile's. He held up his hand to silence his brother before he could speak and crossed the room to admit her.

She greeted him with a warm hug; and only after they stepped back from each other did she notice that there was someone else in the room.

"Forgive me, Prestimion. I didn't know that you were-"

"This is my brother Abrigant, newly among us again after a difficult journey to the far south, questing after the land of iron. It took him very much by surprise, apparently, to discover that I had married in his absence. Abrigant: here is my consort Varaile.

"Brother," she said unhesitatingly. "How happy I am to know that you've returned safely!" And went instantly to him and enfolded him in an embrace nearly as warm as the one she had given Prestimion.

Abrigant seemed taken aback for a moment by the immediate openhearted fondness of her greeting, and returned it stiffly and awkwardly at first But then he took her more wholeheartedly into his arms; and when he released her his eyes were shining in a new way and his fairskinned face was reddened with confusion and pleasure. It wasplain to see that Varaile had won him over in an instant, that he was overwhelmed by the beauty and poise and imposing presence of his brother's new wife.

"I was just telling Lord Prestimion," Abrigant said, "how greatly I regretted missing your wedding. I am the brother nearest to him in age; it would have been my great pleasure to stand beside him when he spoke his vows."

"He too regretted it that you could not be there," said Varaile. "But it was possible you'd be gone a very long while, and no one was sure how long. We both thought it best not to wait."

"I quite understand," Abrigant said, with a little bow. He could not have been more courtly, now. The angry man of a few moments before had utterly vanished. Looking toward Prestimion, he said, "I think we've finished our business for now, brother. -I'll go to my rooms, if I may, and leave you with your lady."

His eyes were glowing, and the meaning of that glow was as unmistakable to Prestimion as if it were possible for him to read his brother's thoughts. You have done well for yourself, brother. This woman is truly a queen!

"No, no," Varaile said, "I was just passing by. I wouldn't want to interrupt your meeting. Surely you two still have much to tell each other."

She blew Prestimion a kiss and started toward the door. "Will we be lunching in the Pinitor Court as usual, my lord?"

"I think we will. And perhaps Abrigant will join us."

"I would like that," she said pleasantly, and made gestures of farewell to them both, and left the room.