Sorcerers of Majipoor

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There had been omens all year, a rain of blood over Ni-moya and sleek hailstones shaped like tears falling on three of the cities of Castle Mount and then a true nightmare vision, a giant four-legged black beast with fiery ruby eyes and a single spiraling horn in its forehead, swimming through the air above the port city of Alaisor at twilight. That was a beast of a sort never before seen on Majipoor, not anywhere in the land and certainly not in the sky. And now, in his virtually inaccessible bedchamber at the deepest level of the Labyrinth, the aged Pontifex Prankipin lay dying at last, surrounded by the corps of mages and wizards and thaumaturges that had been the comfort of the old man’s later years.

Throughout the world it was a time of tension and apprehension. Who could tell what transformations and hazards the death of the Pontifex might bring? Things had been stable for so long: four full decades, and then some, since there had been a change of ruler on Majipoor.

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