Majipoor Chronicles

SEVEN Crime and Punishment

That one takes him back to the beginning of his explorations of these archives. Thesme and the Ghayrog all over again, another forest romance, the love of human and non-human. Yet the similarities are all on the surface, for these were very different people in very different circumstances, Hissune comes away from the tale with what he thinks is a reasonably good understanding of the soul-painter Therion Nismile — some of whose works, he learns, are still on display in the galleries of Lord Valentine's Castle — but the Metamorph is a mystery to him still, as great a mystery perhaps as she had been to Nismile. He checks the index for recordings of Metamorph souls, but is unsurprised to find that there are none. Do the Shapeshifters refuse to record, or is the apparatus incapable of picking up the emanations of their minds, or are they merely banned from the archives? Hissune does not know and he is unable to find out. In time, he tells himself, all things will be answered. Meanwhile there is much more to discover. The operations of the King of Dreams, for instance — he needs to learn much more about those. For a thousand years the descendants of the Barjazids have had the task of lashing the sleeping minds of criminals; Hissune wonders how it is done. He prowls the archives, and before long fortune delivers up to him the soul of an outlaw, disguised drearily as a tradesman of the city of Stee—

The murder was amazingly easy to commit. Little Gleim was standing by the open window of the little upstairs room of the tavern in Vugel where he and Haligome had agreed to meet. Haligome was near the couch. The discussion was not going well. Haligome asked Gleim once more to reconsider.

Gleim shrugged and said, "You're wasting your time and mine. I don't see where you have any case at all."

At that moment it seemed to Haligome that Gleim and Gleim alone stood between him and the tranquillity of life that he felt he deserved, that Gleim was his enemy, his nemesis, his persecutor. Calmly Haligome walked toward him, so calmly that Gleim evidently was not in the least alarmed, and with a sudden smooth motion he pushed Gleim over the windowsill.

Gleim looked amazed. He hung as if suspended in mid-air for a surprisingly long moment; then he dropped toward the swiftly flowing river just outside the tavern, hit the water with scarcely a splash, and was carried away rapidly toward the distant foothills of Castle Mount. In an instant he was lost to view.

Haligome looked at his hands as though they had just sprouted on his wrists. He could not believe they had done what they had done. Again he saw himself walking toward Gleim; again he saw Gleim standing bewildered on air; again he saw Gleim vanish into the dark river. Probably Gleim was already dead. If not, then within another minute or two. They would find him sooner or later, Haligome knew, washed up on some rocky shore down by Canzilaine or Perimor, and somehow they would identify him as a merchant of Gimkan-dale, missing the past week or ten days. But would there be any reason for them to suspect he had been murdered? Murder was an uncommon crime. He could have fallen. He could have jumped. Even if they managed to prove — the Divine only knew how — that Gleim had gone unwillingly to his death, how could they demonstrate that he had been pushed from the window of a tavern in Vugel by Sigmar Haligome of the city of Stee? They could not, Haligome told himself. But that did not change the essential truth of the situation, which was that Gleim had been murdered and Haligome was his murderer.

His murderer? That new label astonished Haligome. He had not come here to kill Gleim, only to negotiate with him. But the negotiations had been sour from the start. Gleim, a small, fastidious man, refused entirely to admit liability over a matter of defective equipment, and said that it must have been Haligome's inspectors who were at fault. He refused to pay a thing, or even to show much sympathy for Haligome's awkward financial plight. At that final bland refusal Gleim appeared to swell until he filled all the horizon, and all of him was loathsome, and Haligome wished only to be rid of him, whatever the cost. If he had stopped to think about his act and its consequences he would not, of course, have pushed Gleim out the window, for Haligome was not in any way a murderous man. But he had not stopped to think, and now Gleim was dead and Haligome's life had undergone a grotesque redefinition: he had transformed himself in a moment from Haligome the jobber of precision instruments to Haligome the murderer. How sudden! How strange! How terrifying!

And now?

Trembling, sweating, dry-throated, Haligome closed the window and dropped down on the couch. He had no idea of what he was supposed to do next. Report himself to the imperial proctors? Confess, surrender, and enter prison, or wherever it was that criminals were sent? He had no preparation for any of this. He had read old stories of crimes and punishments, ancient myths and fables, but so far as he knew murder was an extinct crime and the mechanisms for its detection and expiation had long ago rusted away. He felt prehistoric; he felt primeval. There was that famous story of a sea-captain of the remote past who had pushed a crazed crewman overboard during an ill-fated expedition across the Great Sea, after that crewman had killed someone else. Such tales had always seemed wild and implausible to Haligome. But now, effortlessly, unthinkingly, he had made himself a legendary figure, a monster, a taker of human life. He knew that nothing would ever again be the same for him.

One thing to do was to get away from the tavern. If someone had seen Gleim fall — not likely, for the tavern stood flush against the riverbank; Gleim had gone out a back window and had been swallowed up at once by the rushing flow — there was no point in standing around here waiting for investigators to arrive. Quickly he packed his one small suitcase, checked to see that nothing of Gleim's was in the room, and went downstairs. There was a Hjort at the desk. Haligome produced a few crowns and said, "I'd like to settle my account."

He resisted the impulse to chatter. This was not the moment to make clever remarks that might imprint him on the Hjort's memory. Pay your bill and clear out fast, he thought. Was the Hjort aware that the visitor from Stee had entertained a guest in his room? Well, the Hjort would quickly enough forget that, and the visitor from Stee as well, if Haligome gave him no reason to remember. The clerk totalled the figures; Haligome handed over some coins; to the Hjort's mechanical "Please come again" Haligome made an equally mechanical reply, and then he was out on the street, walking briskly away from the river. A strong sweet breeze was blowing downslope. The sunlight was bright and warm. It was years since Haligome had last been in Vugel, and at another time he might well have taken a few hours to tour its famous jeweled plaza, its celebrated soul-painting murals, and the other local wonders, but this was not the moment for tourism. He hurried to the transit terminal and bought a one-way ticket back to Stee.

Fear, uncertainty, guilt, and shame rode with him on the journey around the flank of Castle Mount from city to city.

The familiar sprawling outskirts of gigantic Stee brought him some repose. To be home meant to be safe. With each new day of his entry into Stee he felt more comfort. There was the mighty river for which the city was named, tumbling in astonishing velocity down the Mount. There were the smooth shining facades of the Riverwall Buildings, forty stories high and miles in length. There was Kinniken Bridge; there was Thimin Tower; there was the Field of Great Bones. Home! The enormous vitality and power of Stee, throbbing all about him as he made his way from the central terminal to his suburban district, comforted him greatly. Surely here in what had become the greatest city of Majipoor — vastly expanded, thanks to the beneficence of its native son who was now the Coronal Lord Kinniken — Haligome was safe from the dark consequences, whatever they might be, of the lunatic deed he had committed in Vugel.

He embraced his wife, his two young daughters, his sturdy son. They could readily see his fatigue and tension, it appeared, for they treated him with a kind of exaggerated delicacy, as though he had become newly fragile on his journey. They brought him wine, a pipe, slippers; they bustled round, radiating love and good will; they asked him nothing about how his trip had gone, but regaled him instead with local gossip. Not until dinner did he say at last, "I think Gleim and I worked everything out. There's reason to be hopeful."

He nearly believed it himself.

Was there any way the murder could be laid to him, if he simply kept quiet about it? He doubted that there could have been witnesses. It would not be hard for the authorities to discover that he and Gleim had agreed to meet in Vugel — neutral ground — to discuss their business disagreements, but what did that prove? "Yes, I saw him in some tavern near the river," Haligome could say. "We had lunch and drank a lot of wine and came to an understanding, and then I went away. He looked pretty wobbly when I left, I must say." And poor Gleim, flushed and staggering with a bellyful of the strong wine of Muldemar, must have leaned too far out the window afterward, perhaps for a view of some elegant lord and lady sailing past on the river — no, no, no, let them do all the speculating, Haligome told himself. "We met for lunch and reached a settlement, and then I went away," and nothing more than that. And who could prove it had been otherwise?

He returned to his office the next day and went about his business as though nothing unusual had happened in Vugel. He could not allow himself the luxury of brooding over his crime. Things were precarious: he was close to bankrupt, his credit overextended, his plausibility with his prime accounts sadly diminished. All that was Gleim's doing. Once you ship shoddy goods, though, you go on suffering for it for a long time, no matter how blameless you may be. Having had no satisfaction from Gleim — and not likely to get any, now — Haligome's only recourse was to strive with intense dedication to rebuild the confidence of those whom he supplied with precision instruments, while at the same time struggling to hold off his creditors until matters returned to equilibrium.

Keeping Gleim out of his mind was difficult. Over the next few days his name kept coming up, and Haligome had to work hard to conceal his reactions. Everyone in the trade seemed to understand that Gleim had taken Haligome for a fool, and everyone was trying to seem sympathetic. That in itself was encouraging. But to have every conversation somehow wander around to Gleim — Gleim's iniquities, Gleim's vindictiveness, Gleim's tightfistedness — threw Haligome constantly off balance. The name was like a trigger. "Gleim!" and he would go rigid. "Gleim!" and muscles would throb in his cheeks. ""Gleim!" and he would thrust his hands out of sight behind him, as if they bore the imprint of the dead man's aura. He imagined himself saying to some client, in a moment of sheer weariness, "I killed him, you know. I pushed him out a window when I was in Vugel." How easily the words would flow from his lips, if only he relaxed his control!

He thought of making a pilgrimage to the Isle to cleanse his soul. Later, perhaps: not now, for now he had to devote every waking moment to his business affairs, or his firm would collapse and his family would fall into poverty. He thought also of confessing and coming quickly to some understanding with the authorities that would allow him to atone for the crime without disrupting his commercial activities. A fine, maybe — though how could he afford a fine now? And would they let him off so lightly? In the end he did nothing at all except to try to shove the murder out of his consciousness, and for a week or ten days that actually seemed to work. And then the dreams began.

The first one came on Starday night in the second week of summer, and Haligome knew instantly that it was a sending of a dark and painful kind. He was in his third sleep, the deepest of the night just before the mind's ascent into dawn, and he found himself crossing a field of gleaming and slippery yellow teeth that churned and writhed beneath his feet. The air was foul, swamp air of a discouraging grayish hue, and ropy strands of some raw meaty substance dangled from the sky, brushing against his cheeks and arms and leaving sticky tracks that burned and throbbed. There was a ringing in his ears: the harsh tense silence of a malign sending, that makes it seem as though the world has been drawn far too tight on its drawstrings, and beyond that a distant jeering laughter. An intolerably bright light seared the sky. He was traversing a mouthplant, he realized — one of those hideous carnivorous floral monsters of far-off Zimroel, that he once had seen exhibited in a show of curios at the Kinniken Pavilion. But those were only three or four yards in diameter, and this was the size of a goodly suburb, and he was trapped in its diabolical core, running as fast as he could to keep from slipping down into those mercilessly grinding teeth.

So this is how it will be, he thought, floating above his dream and bleakly surveying it. This is the first sending, and the King of Dreams will torment me hereafter.

There was no hiding from it. The teeth had eyes, and the eyes were the eyes of Gleim, and Haligome was scrambling and sliding and sweating, and now he pitched forward and tumbled against a bank of the remorseless teeth and they nipped his hand, and when he was able to get to his feet again he saw that the bloody hand was no longer his own familiar one, but had been transformed into the small pale hand of Gleim, fitting badly on his wrist. Again Haligome fell, and again the teeth nipped at him, and again came an unwelcome metamorphosis, and again, and again, and he ran onward, sobbing and moaning, half Gleim, half Haligome, until he broke from his sleep and discovered himself sitting up, trembling, sweatsoaked, clutching his astounded wife's thigh as though it were a liefline.

"Don't," she murmured. "You're hurting me. What is it? What is it?"

"Dream — very bad—"

"A sending?" she asked. "Yes, it must have been. I can smell the odor of it in your sweat. Oh, Sigmar, what was it?"

He shuddered. "Something I ate. The sea-dragon meat — it was too dry, too old—"

He left the bed unsteadily and poured a little wine, which calmed him. His wife stroked him and bathed his feverish forehead and held him until he relaxed a little, but he feared going back to sleep, and lay awake until dawn, staring into the gray darkness. The King of Dreams! So this was to be his punishment. Bleakly he considered things. He had always believed that the King of Dreams was only a fable to keep children in line. Yes, yes, they said that he lived in Suvrael, that the title was the hereditary holding of the Barjazid family, that the King and his minions scanned the night air for the guilts of sleepers, and found the souls of the unworthy and tormented them, but was it so? Haligome had never known anyone to have a sending from the King of Draams. He thought he might once have had one from the Lady, but he was not sure of that, and in any case that was different. The Lady offered only the most general kind of visions. The King of Dreams was said to inflict real pain; but could the King of Dreams really monitor the entire teeming planet, with its billions of citizens, not all of them virtuous?

Possibly it was only indigestion, Haligome told himself.

When the next night and the next passed calmly, he allowed himself to believe that the dream had been no more than a random anomaly. The King might only be a fable after all. But on Twoday came another unmistakable sending.

The same silent ringing sound. The same fierce glaring light illuminating the landscape of sleep. Images of Gleim; laughter; echoes; swellings and contractions of the fabric of the cosmos; a wrenching giddiness blasting his spirit with terrible vertigo. Haligome whimpered. He buried his face against the pillow and fought for breath. He dared not awaken, for if he surfaced he would inevitably reveal his distress to his wife, and she would suggest that he take his dreams to a speaker, and he could not do that. Any speaker worth her fee would know at once that she was joining her soul with the soul of a criminal, and what would happen to him then? So he suffered his nightmare until the force of it was spent, and only then he awakened, to lie limp and quivering until the coming of the day.

That was Twoday's nightmare. Fourday's was worse: Haligome soared and dropped and was impaled on the ultimate summit of Castle Mount, spear-sharp and cold as ice, and lay there for hours while gihorna-birds with the face of Gleim ripped at his belly and bombarded his dripping wounds with blazing droppings. Fiveday he slept reasonably well, though he was tense, on guard for dreams; Starday too brought no sendings; Sunday found him swimming through oceans of clotted blood while his teeth loosened and his fingers turned to strips of ragged dough; Moonday and Twoday brought milder horrors, but horrors all the same; on Seaday morning his wife said, "These dreams of yours will not relent. Sigmar, what have you done?"

"Done? I've done nothing!"

"I feel the sendings surging through you night after night."

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.

Yet life as Miklan Forb had been good for nine months of peace. With his small savings he bought a ticket downslope to Amblemorn, where he became Degrail Gilalin, and earned ten crowns a week as a bird-limer on the estate of a local prince. He had five months of freedom from torment, until the night when sleep brought him the crackle of silence and the fury of limitless light and the vision of an arch of disembodied eyes strung like a bridge across the universe, all those eyes watching only him. He journeyed along the River Glayge to Makroprosopos, where he lived a month unscathed as Ogvorn Brill before the coming of a dream of crystals of fiery metal multiplying like hair in his throat. Overland through the arid inlands he went as part of a caravan to the market city of Sisivondal, which was a journey of eleven weeks. The King of Dreams found him in the seventh of those and sent him out screaming at night to roll about in a thicket of whipstaff plants, and that was no dream, for he was bleeding and swollen when he finally broke free from the plants, and had to be carried to the next village for medicines. Those with whom he traveled knew that he was one who had sendings of the King, and they left him behind; but eventually he found his way to Sisivondal, a drab and monochromatic place so different from the splendid cities of Castle Mount that he wept each morning at the sight of it. But all the same he stayed there six months without incident. Then the dreams came back and drove him westward, a month here and six weeks there, through nine cities and as many identities, until at last to Alaisor on the coast, where he had a year of tranquillity under the name of Badril Maganorn, gutting fish in a dockside market. Despite his forebodings he allowed himself to begin believing that the King was at last done with him, and he speculated on the possibility of returning to his old life in Stee, from which he had now been absent almost four years. Was four years of punishment not enough for an unpremeditated, almost accidental, crime?

Evidently not. Early in his second year at Alaisor he felt the familiar ominous buzz of a sending throbbing behind the wall of his skull, and there came upon him a dream that made all the previous ones seem like children's holiday theatricals. It began in the bleak wastelands of Suvrael, where he stood on a jagged peak looking across a dry and blasted valley at a forest of sigupa trees, that gave off an emanation fatal to all life that came within ten miles, even unwary birds and insects that flew above the thick drooping branches. His wife and children could be seen in the valley, marching steadily toward the deadly trees; he ran toward them, in sand that clung like molasses, and the trees stirred and beckoned, and his loved ones were swallowed up in their dark radiance and fell and vanished entirely. But he continued onward until he was within the grim perimeter. He prayed for death, but he alone was immune to the trees. He came among them, each isolated and remote from the others, and nothing growing about them, no shrubs nor vines nor ground-covers, merely a long array of ugly leafless trees standing like palisades in the midst of nowhere. That was all there was to the dream, but it carried a burden of frightfulness far beyond all the grotesqueries of image that he had endured before, and it went on and on, Haligome wandering forlorn and solitary among those barren trees as though in an airless void, and when he awakened his face was withered and his eyes were quivering as if he had aged a dozen years between night and dawn.

He was defeated utterly. Running was useless; hiding was futile, He belonged to the King of Dreams forever.

No longer did he have the strength to keep creating new lives and identities for himself in these temporary refuges. When daybreak cleared the terror of the forest dream from his spirit he staggered to the temple of the Lady on Alaisor Heights, and asked to be allowed to make the pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep. He gave his name as Sigmar Haligome. What had he left to conceal?

He was accepted, as everyone is, and in time he boarded a pilgrim-ship bound for Numinor on the northeastern flank of the Isle. Occasional sendings harassed him during the sea-crossing, some of them merely irritating, a few of terrible impact, but when he woke and trembled and wept there were other pilgrims to comfort him, and somehow now that he had surrendered his life to the Lady the dreams, even the worst of them, mattered little. The chief pain of the sendings, he knew, is the disruption they bring to one's daily life: the haunting, the strangeness. But now he had no life of his own to be disrupted, so what did it matter that he opened his eyes to a morning of trembling? He was no longer a jobber of precision instruments or a digger of wireweed sprouts or a limer of birds; he was nothing, he was no one, he had no self to defend against the incursions of his foe. In the midst of a flurry of sendings a strange kind of peace came over him.

In Numinor he was received into the Terrace of Assessment, the outer rim of the Isle, where for all he knew he would spend the rest of his life. The Lady called her pilgrims inward step by step, according to the pace of their invisible inner progress, and one whose soul was stained by murder might remain forever in some menial role on the edge of the holy domain. That was all right. He wanted only to escape the sendings of the King, and he hoped that sooner or later he would come under the protection of the Lady and be forgotten by Suvrael.

In soft pilgrim-robes he toiled as a gardener in the outermost terrace for six years. His hair was white, his hack was stooped; he learned to tell weed-seedlings from blossom-seedlings; he suffered from sendings every month or two at first, and then less frequently, and though they never left him entirely he found them increasingly unimportant, like the twinges of some ancient wound. Occasionally he thought of his family, who doubtless thought him dead. He thought also of Gleim, eternally frozen in astonishment, hanging in midair before he fell to his death. Had there ever been such a person, and had Haligome truly killed him? It seemed unreal now; it was so terribly long ago. Haligome felt no guilt for a crime whose very existence he was coming to doubt. But he remembered a business quarrel, and an arrogant refusal by the other merchants to see his frightening dilemma, and a moment of blind rage in which he had struck out at his enemy. Yes, yes, it had all happened; and, thought Haligome, Gleim and I both lost our lives in that moment of fury.

Haligome performed his tasks faithfully, did his meditation, visited dream-speakers — it was required here, but they never offered comments or interpretations — and took holy instruction. In the spring of his seventh year he was summoned inward to the next stage on the pilgrimage, the Terrace of Inception, and there he remained month after month, while other pilgrims moved through and past to the Terrace of Mirrors beyond. He said little to anyone, made no friends, and accepted in resignation the sendings that still came to him at widely spaced intervals.

In his third year at the Terrace of Inception he noticed a man of middle years staring at him in the dining-hall, a short and frail man with an oddly familiar look. For two weeks this newcomer kept Haligome under close surveillance, until at last Haligome's curiosity was too strong to control; he made inquiries and was told that the man's name was Goviran Gleim.

Of course. Haligome went to him during an hour of free time and said, "Will you answer a question?"

"If I can."

"Are you a native of the city of Gimkandale on Castle Mount?"

"I am," said Goviran Gleim. "And you, are you a man of Stee?"

"Yes," said Haligome.

They were silent for some time. Then at last Haligome said, "So you have been pursuing me all these years?"

"Why no. Not at all."

"It is only coincidence that we are both here?"

Goviran Gleim said, "I think there is no such thing as coincidence, in fact. But it was not by my conscious design that I came to the place where you were."

"You know who I am, and what I have done?"

"Yes."

"And what do you want of me?" asked Haligome.

"Want? Want?" Gleim's eyes, small and dark and gleaming like those of his long-dead father, looked close into Haligome's. "What do I want? Tell me what happened in the city of Vugel."

"Come. Walk with me," said Haligome.

They passed through a close-clipped blue-green hedge and into the garden of alabandains that Haligome tended, thinning the buds to make for larger blooms. In these fragrant surroundings Haligome described, speaking flatly and quietly, the events that he had never described to anyone and that had become nearly unreal to him: the quarrel, the meeting, the window, the river. No emotion was apparent on the face of Goviran Gleim during the recitation, although Haligome searched the other man's features intently, trying to read his purpose.

When he was done describing the murder Haligome waited for response. There was none.

Ultimately Gleim said, "And what happened to you afterward? Why did you disappear?"

"The King of Dreams whipped my soul with evil sendings, and put me in such torment that I took up hiding in Normork; and when he found me there I went on, fleeing from place to place, and eventually in my flight I came to the Isle as a pilgrim."

"And the King still follows you?"

"From time to time I have sendings," said Haligome. He shook his head. "But they are useless. I have suffered, I have done penance, and it has been meaningless, for I feel no guilt for my crime. It was a moment of madness, and I have wished a thousand thousand times that it had never occurred, but I can find in myself no responsibility for your father's death: he goaded me to frenzy, and I pushed, and he fell, but it was not an act that bears any connection to the way I conducted the other aspects of my life, and it was therefore not mine."

"You feel that, do you?"

"Indeed. And these years of tormented dreams — what good did they do? If I had refrained from killing out of fear of the King the whole system of punishment would be justified; but I gave no thought to anything, least of all the King of Dreams, and I therefore see the code under which I have been punished as a futile one. So too with my pilgrimage: I came here not so much to atone as to hide from the King and his sendings, and I suppose I have essentially achieved that. But neither my atonement nor my sufferings will bring your father back to life, so all this charade has been without purpose. Come: kill me and get it over with."

"Kill you?" said Gleim.

"Isn't that what you intend?"

"I was a boy when my father vanished. I am no longer young now, and you are older still, and all this is ancient history. I wanted only to know the truth of his death, and I know it now. Why kill you? If it would bring my father back to life, perhaps I would, but, as you yourself point out, nothing can do that. I feel no anger toward you and I have no wish to experience torment at the hands of the King. For me, at least, the system is a worthy deterrent."

"You have no wish to kill me," said Haligome, amazed. "None."

"No. No. I see. Why should you kill me? That would free me from a life that has become one long punishment."

Gleim again looked astounded. "Is that how you see it?"

"You condemn me to life, yes."

"But your punishment ended long ago! The grace of the Lady is on you now. Through my father's death you have found your way to her!"

Haligome could not tell whether the other man was mocking him or truly meant his words.

"You see grace in me?" he asked.

"I do."

Haligome shook his head. "The Isle and all it stands for are nothing to me. I came here only to escape the onslaughts of the King. I have at last found a place to hide, and no more than that."

Gleim's gaze was steady. "You deceive yourself," he said, and walked away, leaving Haligome stunned and dazed.

Could it be? Was he purged of his crime, and had not understood that? He resolved that if that night a sending of the King came to him — and he was due, for it had been nearly a year since the last one — he would walk to the outer edge of the Terrace of Assessment and throw himself into the sea. But what came that night was a sending of the Lady, a warm and gentle dream summoning him inward to the Terrace of Mirrors. He still did not understand fully, and doubted that he ever would. But his dream-speaker told him in the morning to go on at once to that shining terrace that lay beyond, for the next stage of his pilgrimage had commenced.