Lord Prestimion by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780061058103
Publisher: Eos
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The section of the city where the riverboat came to shore was called Strelain, which Akbalik told him was the name of Ni-moya's central district. A government floater was waiting for them; it took them up and up through the hilly streets of the great city, and deposited them at last at the tall building that was to be their home for the next few months.

Dekkeret's little apartment was on the fifteenth floor. That a building could have so many floors was something that had never occurred to him. Standing by the wide window, peering out at the tops of the buildings below, and at the river farther on, and the dark line of the Zimr's southern shore so far off that he could barely make it out, he had the giddy feeling that the building might at any moment pitch forward purely of its own unsustainable height and tumble down the hill, scattering its component bricks far and wide as it fell. He turned away from the window, shuddering. But the building stood firm.

The next day he began work at the Office of Documentary Appeal. That was a subdivision of the Bureau of the Treasury, housed in a back wing of the rambling thousand-year-old governmental complex of blue granite known as the Cascanar Building, in south-central Strelain.

It was meaningless work. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He was supposed to interview people who had had important documents—important to them, anyway—garbled somehow by the bureaucracy, and help them straighten out the confusion. From his first day he found himself attempting to unravel disputes about erroneous listings of birth-dates, improper delineation of property boundaries, muddied self-contradictory statements inserted into legal depositions by careless stenographers, and a host of other such things. There was no reason in the world why it had been necessary to ship him thousands of miles to handle such drab and trifling matters, which any career civil servant already working here could be dealing with.

But the point, he knew, was that everyone in the government, from the Pontifex and Coronal on down, was a career civil servant. And every prince of Castle Mount who had any ambition toward high office was required to put in time doing routine work of just this sort. Even Prestimion, who had been born to the rank of Prince of Muldemar and might have spent a life of pleasant idleness puttering in his vineyards, had had to go through a round of chores like this by way of gathering the practical experience that had carried him to the throne.

Dekkeret, a salesman's son, had never had such grandiose ambitions. The starburst crown was no part of his plan; to be a knight of the Castle seemed as bold an aspiration as he could allow himself. Well, he was that, now, thanks to the happenstance of his having been standing close by the Coronal at the time of the assassination attempt: a knight-initiate, anyway. And therefore he found himself behind this desk at the Office

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