He shrugged. "Some mistake has been made by the Powers that govern us. It must happen occasionally: dreams meant for some child-molester of Pendiwane are delivered to a jobber of precision instruments in Stee. Sooner or later they'll see the error and leave me alone."
"And if they don't?" She gave him a penetrating glance. "And if the dreams are meant for you?"
He wondered if she knew the truth. She was aware that he had gone to Vugel to confer with Gleim: possibly, though it was hard to imagine how, she had learned that Gleim had never returned to his home in Gimkandale; her husband now was receiving sendings of the King of Dreams; she could draw her own conclusions all too readily. Could it be? And if so, what would she do? Denounce her own husband? Though she loved him, she might well do that, for if she let herself harbor a murderer she might bring the vengeance of the King upon her own sleep as well.
He said, "If the dreams continue, I will ask the officials of the Pontifex to intercede on my behalf."
Of course he could not do that. He tried instead to grapple with the dreams and repress them, so that he would arouse no suspicion in the woman who slept by his side. In his presleep meditations he instructed himself to be calm, to accept what images might come, to regard them only as fantasies of a disordered soul, and not as realities with which he needed to cope. And yet when he found himself floating over a red sea of fire, dipping now and then ankle-deep, he could not keep from screaming; and when needles grew outward from his flesh and burst through his skin so that he looked like a manculain, that untouchable spiny beast of the torrid southlands, he whimpered and begged for mercy in his sleep, and when he strolled through the immaculate gardens of Lord Havilbove by Tolingar Barrier and the flawless shrubs became mocking toothy hairy things of sinister ugliness, he wept and broke into torrents of sweat that made the mattress reek. His wife asked no more questions, but she eyed him uneasily and seemed constantly on the verge of demanding how long he intended to tolerate these intrusions on his spirit.
He could scarcely operate his business. Creditors hovered; manufacturers balked at extending further credit; customer complaints swirled about him like dead and withered autumn leaves. Secretly he burrowed in the libraries for information about the King of Dreams and his powers, as though this were some strange new disease that he had contracted and about which he needed to learn everything. But the information was scanty and obvious: the King was an agency of the government, a Power equal in authority to the Pontifex and the Coronal and the Lady of the Isle, and for hundreds of years it had been his role to impose punishment on the guilty.
There has been no trial, Haligome protested silently — But he knew none was needed, and plainly the King knew that too. And as the dread dreams continued, grinding down Haligome's soul and fraying his nerves to threads, he saw that there was no hope of withstanding these sendings. His life in Stee was ended. One moment of rashness and he had made himself an outcast, doomed to wander across the vast face of the planet, searching for some place to hide.
"I need a rest," he told his wife. "I will travel abroad a month or two, and regain my inner peace." He called his son to his side — the boy was almost a man; he could handle the responsibilities now — and turned the business over to him, giving him in an hour a list of maxims that had taken him half a lifetime to learn. Then, with such little cash as he could squeeze from his greatly diminished assets, he set forth out of his splendid native city, aboard the third-class floater bound for — at random — Normork, in the ring of Slope Cities near the foot of Castle Mount. An hour into his journey he resolved never to call himself Sigmar Haligome again, and renamed himself Miklan Forb. Would that be sufficient to divert the force of the King of Dreams?
Perhaps so. The floater drifted across the face of Castle Mount, lazily descending from Stee to Normork by way of Lower Sunbreak, Bibiroon Sweep, and Tolingar Barrier, and at each night's hostelry he went to bed clutching his pillow with terror, but the only dreams that came were the ordinary ones of a tired and fretful man, without that peculiar ghastly intensity that typified sendings of the King. It was pleasant to observe that the gardens of Tolingar Barrier were symmetrical and perfectly tidy, nothing at all like the hideous wastelands of his dream. Haligome began to relax a bit. He compared the gardens with the dream-images, and was surprised to see that the King had provided him with a rich and detailed and accurate view of those gardens just before transforming them into horror, complete to the most minute degree; but he had never before seen them, which meant that the sending had transmitted into his mind an entire cluster of data new to him, whereas ordinary dreams merely called upon that which already was recorded there.
That answered a question that had troubled him. He had not known whether the King was simply liberating the detritus of his unconscious, stirring the murky depths from afar, or was actually beaming imagery into it. Evidently the latter was the case. But that begged another query: were the nightmares specifically designed for Sigmar Haligome, crafted by specialists to stir his particular terrors? Surely there could not be personnel enough in Suvrael to handle that job. But if there were, it meant that they were monitoring him closely, and it was folly to think he could hide from them. He preferred to believe that the King and his minions had a roster of standard nightmares — send him the teeth, send him the gray greasy blobs, now send him the sea of fire — that were brought forth in succession for each malefactor, an impersonal and mechanical operation. Possibly even now they were aiming some grisly phantasms at his empty pillow in Stee.
He came up past Dundilmir and Stipool to Normork, that somber and hermetic walled city perched atop the formidable fangs of Normork Crest. It had not consciously occurred to him before that Normork, with its huge circumvallation of cyclopean blocks of black stone, had the appropriate qualities for a hiding-place: protected, secure, impregnable. But of course not even the walls of Normork could keep out the vengeful shafts of the King of Dreams, he realized.
The Dekkeret Gate, an eye in the wall fifty feet high, stood open as always, the one breach in the fortification, polished black wood bound with a Coronal's ransom of iron bands. Haligome would have preferred that it be closed and triple-locked as well, but of course the great gate was open, for Lord Dekkeret, constructing it in the thirtieth year of his auspicious reign, had decreed that it be closed only at a time when the world was in peril, and these days under the happy guidance of Lord Kinniken and the Pontifex Thimin everything flourished on Majipoor, save only the troubled soul of the former Sigmar Haligome, who called himself Miklan Forb. As Forb he found cheap lodgings on the slopeside quarter of the city, where Castle Mount reared up behind like a second wall of immeasurable height. As Forb he took a job with the maintenance crew that patrolled the city wall day after day, digging the tenacious wireweed out from between the un mortared masonry. As Forb he sank down into sleep each night fearful of what would come, but what came, week after week, was only the blurred and meaningless dreamery of ordinary slumber. For nine months he lived submerged in Normork, wondering if he had escaped the hand of Suvrael; and then one night after a pleasant meal and a flask of fine crimson wine of Bannikanniklole he tumbled into bed feeling entirely happy for the first time since long before his baleful meeting with Gleim, and dropped unwarily to sleep, and a sending of the King came to him and seized his soul by the throat and flailed him with monstrous images of melting flesh and rivers of slime. When the dream was done with him he awoke weeping, for he knew that there was no hiding for long from the avenging Power that pursued him.