The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar

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I had always yearned to visit Sippulgar, that golden city of the southern coast. Every schoolchild hears tales of its extraordinary beauty. But there are many places on Majipoor I yearn to visit—the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, or at least a few of them, and marvelous Dulorn, the shining city of crystalline stone that the Ghayrog folk built in far-off Zimroel, and mighty Ni-moya on that same distant continent, and many another. Our world is a huge one, though, and life is short. I am a man of business, an expediter of merchandise, and business has kept me close to my native city of Sisivondal for most of my days.

It was the strange disappearance and presumed death of Melifont Ambithorn, my wife Thuwayne’s elder brother, that finally brought me to Sippulgar. I had hardly known Melifont at all, you understand: I had met him just twice, once at my wedding and once perhaps ten years later, when one of his many unsuccessful business ventures brought him to Sisivondal for a few days. He was fifteen years older than my wife and she seemed to regard him more as an uncle than as a brother; but when word came to her that he was thought to have perished in some mysterious and unpleasant way, she was deeply affected, far more than I would have thought, asking me to go at once to Sippulgar to see if I could discover what had happened to him, and to lay a memorial wreath on his grave, if he was indeed dead. Thuwayne herself is no traveler; she dislikes the upheavals and discomforts of even the shortest trip most intensely. But she could not bear to leave her brother’s death a mystery, and I think she entertained some hope that I would actually find him still alive. She begged me to go, and I knew that I had no choice but to do it.

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