The End of the Line

“If you really want to learn something about the Shapeshifters,” the District Resident said, “you ought to talk to Mundiveen. He lived among them for about a dozen years, you know.”

“And where do I find this Mundiveen?” Stiamot asked.

“Oh, you’ll see him around. Crazy old doctor with a limp. Eccentric, annoying, a mean little man—he stands right out.”

It was Stiamot’s second day in Domgrave, the largest city—an overgrown town, really—in this obscure corner of northwestern Alhanroel. He had never been in this part of the continent before. No one he knew ever had, either. This was agricultural country, a fertile land of odd greenish soil where a widely spaced series of little settlements, mere scattered specks amidst zones of densely forested wilderness, lay strung out along the saddle that separated massive Mount Haimon from its almost identical twin, the equally imposing Zygnor Peak. The planters here ruled their isolated estates as petty potentates, pretty much doing as they pleased. The region was in its dry time of the year here, when everything that was not irrigated was parched, and the wind out of the west carried the faint salt tang of the distant sea. The only official representative of the government was the District Resident, a fussy, soft-faced man named Kalban Vond, who had been stationed out here for many years, filing all the proper reports on time and stamping all the necessary bureaucratic forms but performing no other significant function.

But now the Coronal Lord Strelkimar, who had grown increasingly strange and unpredictable in his middle years, had taken into his head to set forth on a grand processional, only the second one of his reign, that would take him on a great loop, starting from the capital city of Stee that sprawled halfway up the slope of the great central Mount and descending into the western lowlands beyond, and through these northwestern provinces, out to the sea via Sintalmond and Michimang, down the coast to the big port of Alaisor, and inland again via a zigzag route through Mesilor and Thilambaluc and Sisivondal back up the flank of the Mount to Stee. It was traditional for the Coronal to get himself out of the capital and display himself to the people of the provinces every few years, Majipoor being so huge that the only way to sustain the plausibility of the world government was to give the populace of each far-flung district the occasional chance to behold the actual person of their king.

To Stiamot, though, this particular journey was an absurd one. Why, he wondered, bother with these small agricultural settlements, so far apart, ten thousand people here, twenty thousand there, where the government’s writ was so very lightly observed? This was mainly a wilderness territory, after all, with only this handful of plantations interrupting the thick texture of the forests. The Coronal, Stiamot thought, would do better directing his attention to the major cities, and the cities of the other continent, at that, where he had never been. Over there in distant, largely undeveloped Zimroel, in such remote, practically mythical places as Ni-moya and Pidruid and Til-omon, was the Coronal Lord Strelkimar anything more than a name? And what concern did their people have, really, with the decrees and regulations that came forth from Stee? He needed to make his presence felt there, where a huge population gave no more than lip service to the central government. Here, there was little to gain from a visit by the Coronal.

The chosen route was not without its dangers. The valley towns, Domgrave and Bizfern and Kattikawn and the rest, were mere islands in a trackless realm of forests, and through those forests flitted mysterious bands of aboriginal Metamorphs, still unpacified, who posed a frequent threat to the nearby human settlements. The Metamorphs constituted a great political problem for the rulers of Majipoor, for in all the thousands of years of human settlement here they had never fully reconciled themselves to the existence of the intruders among them, and now seemed to be growing increasingly restive. There were constant rumors that some great Metamorph insurrection was being planned; and, if that was so, this would be the place to launch it. Nowhere else on the continent of Alhanroel were humans and Metamorphs so closely interwoven. It was not impossible that the Coronal’s life would be at risk here.

But it was not Stiamot’s place to set royal policy, or even to quarrel with it, only to see that it was carried out. He was one of the most trusted members of the Coronal’s inner circle, which was not saying much, for Strelkimar had never been an extraordinarily trusting man and had grown more and more secretive as time went along. Possibly the irregular way he had come to the throne had something to do with that, the setting aside of his kindly, foolish, ineffectual cousin Lord Thrykeld, a virtual coup d’etat. In any case, a counsellor who contradicted the Coronal was not likely to remain a counsellor very long; and so, when Strelkimar said, “I will go to Alaisor by way of Zygnor Peak and Mount Haimon, and you will precede me and prepare the way,” Stiamot did not presume to question the wisdom of the route. He was not a weak or a passive man, but he was a loyal one, and he was the Coronal’s right hand, who would never even consider rising up in opposition to his master.

And the journey had a special appeal for Stiamot. He was among those at court who had begun to give careful thought to the need for a new policy toward the aboriginal folk. A good first step would be to learn more about them, and he hoped to do that by coming here.

They had always fascinated him, anyway: their silent, stealthy ways, their aloof and unreadable natures, their customs and religious ideas, and, above all, their biologically baffling gift of shapeshifting. He had spent the past several years gathering whatever information he could about them, striving to know them, to get inside their minds. Without that, what sort of settling of accounts with them could be achieved? But he had never managed any real understanding of them. He knew some words of their language, he had collected a few of their paintings and carvings, he had read what he could find of what had been written about them, and still he stood entirely outside them. They remained as alien to him as they had been when, as a small boy, he had first heard that there existed on Majipoor a race of strange beings that once had had exclusive possession of the vast planet, long before the first humans had ever come to it.

There were no Metamorphs in Stee or any of the other cities in the capital territory, of course, but Stiamot, traveling through the land on this or that mission for the Coronal, had had a few brief glimpses of them. And once, when the Coronal had journeyed down to the Labyrinth to confer with the senior monarch, the Pontifex Gherivale, Stiamot had taken the opportunity to visit the nearby ruins of the ancient Metamorph capital of Velalisier, and quite a wondrous time he had had among those stone temples and pyramids and sacrificial altars. Out here in the hinterlands he hoped for a chance to experience the Metamorph culture at close range. And perhaps the eccentric Dr. Mundiveen would consent to serve as his guide.

Stiamot’s first few days in Domgrave were spent arranging for the Coronal’s arrival, checking out the route he would travel for places of possible risk and seeing to it that the Coronal’s lodgings would be not only secure but appropriately comfortable. It was too much to expect luxury in these parts, but a certain degree of magnificence was necessary to remind the local grandees that the ruler of the world was among them. Kalban Vond, the District Resident, offered his own house for the Coronal’s use—no palace, but the closest thing to a stately house that Domgrave could provide, a many-balconied building three stories high with ornate moldings and handsome inlays of decorative woods—and Stiamot set about having it bedecked with such tapestries and carpets and draperies as this very provincial province could supply. He himself commandeered a smaller but nevertheless pleasant house not far from the main highway as his own headquarters. He met with wine-merchants and providers of meat and game. He sent messengers to the prime landholders of the territory, inviting them to the great banquet that the Coronal would hold. In the evenings he dined with the Resident, who managed to produce reasonable fare, if nothing on a par with what Stiamot had become accustomed to at court, and plied him with questions about the region, the climate, the predominant crops, the personalities of the heads of the leading families, and—eventually—about the Metamorph tribes of the forests.

The Resident, plump and slow-moving and at least twenty years older than Stiamot, was a conventional, cautious man, and beneath his caution Stiamot thought he could detect a weariness, a bleakness of spirit, a thwarted sense that he had hoped for more out of life than a career as District Resident in an unimportant and backward rural district. But he did not seem unintelligent. He listened carefully to Stiamot’s questions and responded in abundant detail, and when Stiamot had returned once too often to the subject of the Metamorphs Kalban Vond said, “You keep coming back to them, don’t you? They must interest you very much.”

“They do. It’s nothing of an official nature, you understand. Just my own curiosity. We could say that I’m something of a student of them.”

The Resident’s sleepy blue eyes turned suddenly bright. “A student? What interests you, may I ask, about those sneaky, nasty savages?”

Stiamot, startled, caught his breath. But he showed his displeasure only by the slightest quirk of his lips. “Is that how you see them?”

“Most of us do, out here.”

“Be that as it may, we have to consider that we share the planet with them. They were here first. We thrust ourselves down among them and shoved them aside.”

“So to speak,” said Kalban Vond primly. “Majipoor’s a big place. There’s plenty of room for both races, wouldn’t you say?” Stiamot managed a faint smile. “I wonder if they see it that way. But in any case, problems are brewing, and it’s necessary to give some thought to them. Our population is growing very rapidly, and I don’t just mean the human population. Ghayrogs—Hjorts—the other non-human groups also—”

“Room for all,” Kalban Vond said, sounding a little nettled. “A very big world. We’ve lived side by side with them fairly peacefully for thousands of years.”

“Side by side, yes. And fairly peacefully, I suppose. But, as I say, there are more of us than ever before. The world is big, but it isn’t infinite. And those thousands of years have gone by, and have they become our friends? Are we heading toward any sort of real rapport with them? You know as well as I do that there have been some very unpleasant incidents, and it’s my impression that those incidents are becoming more frequent. They hate us, don’t they? And we fear them. They put up with our settling on their world because they have no choice, and here in this valley you live next door to them wondering how long they’ll continue to maintain the peace. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps you put it a bit extremely,” the Resident said. “Hate—fear—”

“A moment ago you called them ‘sneaky, nasty savages.’ Which one of us is being extreme? Is that how you usually speak of your friends, Resident?”

“I never claimed they were my friends, you know,” said Kalban Vond. “You’re the one who used the word.”

Stiamot could make no response to that. In the chilly silence that followed the Resident turned aside to open a second bottle of wine and refill their bowls. Something of a confrontational tone was creeping into the conversation, and perhaps this was meant as a calming gesture. They were drinking a surprisingly fine wine, a blue one from Stoienzar in the south. Stiamot had never expected to be offered anything so good here, or to have the Resident be so generous with it.

After a moment he said, a little more gently, “I think we both agree, at any rate, that we’re not making much progress toward developing a more harmonious relationship with them. Not making any at all, in fact. But we need to. As our population grows, so does their resentment of our presence here. If we don’t come to some sort of understanding with them soon, we’ll find ourselves in a state of constant collision with them. Warfare, in fact. I’ve heard the rumors.”

“Well, Prince Stiamot, at least here we agree.”

“It can’t be allowed to happen. We need to head it off.”

“And do you have a plan? Does Lord Strelkimar?”

“It’s not something his lordship has spoken of with me. But I assure you the Council has been discussing it.”

Kalman Vond sat up alertly, and his eyes were once again gleaming. All that weariness and self-pitying sadness had fallen from him in a moment. Stiamot saw the man’s unabashed eager excitement: it must seem to him that he was about to be made privy to intimate details of the deliberations of the Council. Sitting here sipping wine with one of the Coronal’s close advisors was surely the biggest thing that had happened to him in all the years since he had been posted to this dreary province, and the thought that he would very shortly be playing host to the Coronal himself in his very own home must be dizzying.

But no revelations of court deliberations were going to be forthcoming tonight. Stiamot said, “We’ve been speaking about the Metamorphs only in the most general way, so far. Everyone agrees that we need to examine the whole problem much more thoroughly than ever before. And, as I said, my interest in them is a matter of mere personal curiosity. They fascinate me. Now that I find myself in a district where Metamorphs actually live, I hope to get a chance to learn something more about them—some details of their culture, their governmental structure, their religious beliefs, their art—”

“You ought to talk to Dr. Mundiveen about all that,” said Kalban Vond.

Of course Stiamot’s interest in the Metamorphs was much more than a matter of mere personal curiosity, but there was no reason why he had to explain that to the District Resident. The Metamorph problem had been central to Council discussions for the past several years, and, though nothing whatever had been heard from the Coronal on the topic, it surely had to be on his mind as well.

By and large, the Metamorphs kept to their secluded forest homes and the people of the cities and farming districts of Majipoor to the territories they occupied, and each group did its best to pretend that the other was not there, or was, at least, invisible. But there had been a good many ugly incidents. Wherever Metamorph and human interests overlapped, difficulties arose. The Metamorphs held certain places sacred, but who knew which ones they were, until a trespass had occurred? The ever-expanding human population of Majipoor, and its constantly increasing non-human adjuncts, kept pushing outward into new lands where the Metamorphs would abide no intrusion. Reports trickled to the capital of occasional outbreaks of conflict, of kidnappings and killings, of skirmishes, of massacres, even. Information took so long to reach Stee from outlying regions, and arrived in such uncertain form, that no one at the capital could be completely certain of what was taking place; but plainly there was friction, there was violence, and neither side was wholly without blame. Now and again Metamorphs, erupting out of nowhere in the night, had slaughtered human settlers venturing into places that should not have been ventured into. Humans, coming upon some tempting locality that invited settlement, had driven its Metamorph population out by force, or simply destroyed them. There had, of course, been such incidents throughout all the thousands of years since the first emigrants from Old Earth had come to this world. But as the cities spread outward and the agricultural settlements that supported them multiplied, they appeared to be increasing in number, and there were those at court who felt that sooner or later some great precipitating event would touch off an all-out war between the Metamorphs and the humans of Majipoor, and that event could not be many years away.

The court was broken into various factions. Some members of the Coronal’s inner circle, a majority, perhaps, felt that a time was coming when complete separation of the races would have to be enforced, with the Metamorphs packed off into reservations of their own, possibly on the relatively lightly inhabited continent of Zimroel, and permitted there to live as they had always lived, but without access to the territories occupied by humans. An opposing group—not very numerous, but they were exceedingly vocal—regarded that as a futile notion, and were ready to launch an all-out war of extermination, arguing that the Metamorphs could never be confined in that way and such a plan was simply a prescription for an eternity of guerilla warfare.

Stiamot himself, who was by nature a mediator, a peacemaker, had emerged as the leader of a moderate central faction, one that saw great practical difficulties in the separationist scheme and looked upon the idea of a war of extermination as barbaric and repellent. It was Stiamot’s hope that through sympathetic meetings of the minds, a determined attempt by each species to understand the needs and goals of the other, a permanent detente could be established, with clear lines of territorial delineation for each race and complete freedom of travel across those boundaries. In Council he had argued as persuasively as he knew how for such a policy. But Stiamot had not been able to make much headway with that over the extremists to either side of him. So little was known of the real nature of the Metamorphs, and so little had been done to reach out to them, that most council-members looked upon his position as hopelessly idealistic. As for the Coronal, he had stayed aloof from the discussions thus far, lost as he was in what seemed to be some inner anguish that had no connection to any of the governmental issues of the day. But he could not remain aloof forever.

The Coronal’s arrival in Domgrave was still at least a week away when Stiamot saw his first Shapeshifter. It was the quiet time of the morning midway between breakfast and lunch, when the air was dry and still and the sun, climbing toward noon height, held everything in the grip of its insistent force. Stiamot was returning to his lodgings from a meeting with the head of the municipal police, going on foot down a sleepy street of small white-fronted houses flanked by rows of dusty-leaved matabango trees. A tall, very tall, figure wrapped in a flimsy, loosely fitting green robe emerged from an alley fifty feet in front of him, began to cross the street, saw him, halted, turned to face him, stared.

Stiamot halted as well. He knew at once that the man—was it a man?—was a Metamorph, and he was astonished to encounter one right here in town. The few others that he had seen before had been like wraiths, flitting through the edge of some forest glade and vanishing into the underbrush as soon as they were aware that they were being perceived. But here was this one right in downtown Domgrave, unmistakably a Metamorph, tall, thin, sallow-skinned, sharp of cheekbone, with long narrow eyes that sloped inward toward the place where its nose would be if there were anything more than a minuscule bump where a nose ought to be. It seemed as curious about him as he was about it, pausing, standing in that odd stance of theirs, one long leg wrapped around the shin of the other so that it stood with utter and total dignity while balanced on its left foot alone. Its stare was calm and chilly. Stiamot wondered what, if anything, he could do to capitalize on the opportunity that had been so unexpectedly presented to him. “I greet you in the name of the Coronal Lord Strelkimar, whose counsellor I am?” No. Ridiculous. “I am Prince Stiamot of Stee, and I have come here to learn something about –” No. No. “I am a newcomer in Domgrave, and I wonder whether you and I—”

Impossible. There was nothing he could say that would be appropriate. The Shapeshifter clearly did not want anything to do with him. Those cold downsloping eyes left no doubt of that. The purpose of that icy glare was to establish a boundary, not to build a bridge. Stiamot and the Metamorph were separated not only by fifty feet of space but by an infinitely greater gulf of difference, and there was no way to breach that barrier. All Stiamot could do was stand, and stare, and curse himself for a blithering feckless fool, hopelessly unprepared for this meeting with one of the beings he had come here to make contact with.

Then for a single strange moment the outlines of the Shapeshifter’s body seemed to blur and flicker, and Stiamot realized he was watching some kind of brief, barely perceptible metamorphosis take place, a loosening and transmogrification of form that ended as quickly as it had begun, as though the Shapeshifter were saying, mockingly, I can do this and you cannot. And then the Metamorph swung around and continued on its way across the street, disappearing from view in a dozen longlegged strides, leaving Stiamot standing stunned and bewildered in the mid-morning stillness.

There was a second significant encounter much later that same day. Stiamot had fallen into the habit of going at the end of the day with some of the younger staff aides to an inn just off the main square that was frequented by the town’s wealthier planters and any visitor from the outlying plantations who happened to be in Domgrave on business. Since these people were going to bear most of the not inconsiderable expense of playing host to a Coronal making the grand processional, it seemed like a wise tactic for Stiamot to go among them, share a couple of flasks of wine with them in their cramped, dreary little tavern, reassure them that they would find the visit of the Coronal Lord very much to their benefit.

“He wouldn’t have bitten you, you know,” a dry, flat-toned voice said as Stiamot entered.

He turned. “Pardon me?”

“The Piurivar. They’re a damned shy bunch, most of them. If you actually want to get anywhere with them, you’ve got to open your mouth, not just stand there like a gaffed gromwark waiting for them to say something. I’m Mundiveen, by the way.” Stiamot had already figured that much out. Crazy old doctor with a limp, Kalban Vond had said. Eccentric, annoying. Stands right out. That much was easy. The man who stood before him, one elbow hooked lazily over the counter of the bar, was old, small, lean almost to the point of fleshlessness, a short, compact figure with piercingly intense gray eyes and a long, wild shock of coarse, unkempt white hair. Stiamot, who was only of medium height himself, towered over him. Mundiveen held his head at an odd angle to his neck and his body pivoted strangely at the middle, as though there might be some sort of a twist in his spine. It was not hard to imagine that he would walk with a limp.

“Stiamot,” he said uncomfortably. “Of Stee.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. The Coronal’s advance man. Everybody in town knows who you are.”

“And what I’ve been doing, also, I guess. You saw me talking to the—Piurivar, you called it?”

“That’s what they call themselves. I like to use the term too. Metamorph, Shapeshifter, Piurivar, whatever you like. No, I didn’t see you with him. What would I be doing awake at that hour? But he told me about it. He said you looked at him as though he were a creature from some other world. What do you like to drink, eh, Stiamot? First one’s on me.”

Stiamot shot a quick glance at the two aides with whom he had entered the inn, wordlessly telling them to fade away, and said to Mundiveen, “Let’s start with gray wine, shall we? And then, when I’m paying, we can go on to the blue.”

It was strange how quickly Stiamot began to feel at ease with this quirky little man. They would never be friends, Stiamot saw at once: the doctor was all sharp edges, prickly as a zelzifor, and Stiamot doubted that “friendship” was a word in his working vocabulary. The harsh, hopeless laugh with which he punctuated his sentences betrayed a profound mistrust of humanity. But Mundiveen seemed to be willing enough to accept a little companionship from Stiamot, at least. They crossed the room together—he did have a distinct limp, Stiamot saw—and settled at a corner table, and a zone of privacy appeared to take form around them, an invisible wall that set the two of them off from the crowd of noisy, boisterous planters who filled the room.

Mundiveen let him know right away that he was just about the only man in town who understood anything about the Shapeshifters. “Spent a lot of time with them, you know. Right there in their own forest. Helped one mend a badly broken arm—they do have bones, by the way, nothing like yours or mine but bones all the same, and they can break—and he took a kind of liking to me, and that was the beginning. One outcast to another, you might say.”

“That’s how you see yourself, an outcast?”

“That’s what I am,” said Mundiveen, laughing his hopeless little laugh, and bent low over his wine-bowl to forestall farther inquiry.

“The District Resident said you’d lived among them for a dozen years.”

“I still do live among them. If I can be said to live among anybody, that is.”

“You live in the forest?”

“I have a place in town, and one in the forest. I move from one to the other as the spirit takes me. We need another flask of wine. You pay, this time.”

“Of course.” Stiamot signalled to the barmaid. “Where were you from, originally?”

“Stee, same as you.”

“Stee? Really?”

“You seem surprised. No reason to be. Stee’s a big city; nobody can know everybody. It was a long time ago, anyway. You were probably just a boy when I left there. Your Coronal, Lord Strelkimar. How is he?”

That was an odd phrase, Stiamot thought: your Coronal. He was everybody’s Coronal. “His health, you mean?”

“His health, his state of well-being, his inner equilibrium, whatever you want to call it.”

Stiamot hesitated. His eyes met the little man’s—they were very pale eyes, not gray, as Stiamot had first thought, but a sort of washed-out yellowish-green, and one seemed imperfectly aligned with the other—and they revealed nothing, absolutely nothing. It would be improper, of course, for him to discuss the Coronal’s state of well-being, of inner equilibrium, with any stranger he happened to meet in a tavern, even if the Coronal were in a perfect state of well-being, but especially because he was not. He paused just long enough and said, “He’s fine, of course.”

“I knew him,” said Mundiveen. “In my days at court. Before he became Coronal. And for a short while after.”

“You were at court?”

“Of course,” Mundiveen said, and took refuge once more in his wine-bowl.

The conversation, when it resumed, centered on the Shapeshifters. Mundiveen seemed to know—how? From the Resident, no doubt—that Stiamot had some special interest in them, and asked him what that was about. Stiamot attempted to explain, as he had to Kalban Vond, that it was primarily a matter of intellectual curiosity, a private hobby: he was, he said, fascinated by their folkways, their religious beliefs, their art, their language. But the fact that he was a member of the Coronal’s staff, and not just that but an actual member of his Council, obviously made all that ring false to Mundiveen, who listened with as much patience as he seemed able to muster and finally said, “I’m sure you find them very interesting. So do I. Well, is some sort of policy shift in the making?”

“Policy of what sort?”

“You know what I’m saying. Policy toward the Piurivars.”

Stiamot smiled. “Even if there were, I’d hardly be likely to want to discuss it, would I?”

“Even if there were, I suppose you wouldn’t,” said Mundiveen.

Beyond any doubt Mundiveen was the man to cultivate here. He was unlikely to learn anything valuable about the Metamorphs from the planters, all of whom appeared to regard them with contempt or loathing, if not complete indifference, mere impediments to their intended expansion of their plantations. But Stiamot knew he had to go slowly with this sardonic, bitter little cripple. There was something dark and angry in Mundiveen that had to be approached with caution: one could not be too open with him until one had some idea of the forces that drove that anger and that bitterness, and it was too soon to start probing for that now.

Besides, he had plenty of other things to do. Couriers brought him daily bulletins on the progress of the Coronal and his traveling companions: he was in Byelk, he was in Bizfern, he was in Milimorn, he was in Singaserin, he was moving steadily westward. He would stay the night in Kattikawn and in three days he would arrive in Domgrave. Stiamot spent the three days going over the final invitation list for the state banquet they would hold here, working out the formal program of speeches, conferring with the purveyors of meats and wines. And there were security issues to address. The Metamorphs came and went as they chose in the dark, sinister forests that surrounded these valley towns, and, as Stiamot could testify from personal experience, they seemed able to materialize and disappear like phantoms. If they had it in mind to assassinate a Coronal, madness though that would be, they would never have a better opportunity than this. Strelkimar was coming with his own guard, of course, but Stiamot thought it wise to enlist local peacekeepers in his service as well, and did.

On the second of those three busy days he went to the tavern again in the afternoon and found Mundiveen there once more, and had the same sort of uneasy arm’s-length conversation with him over a couple of expensive flasks of wine, centering mostly on Mundiveen’s years in the forest with the Shapeshifters. He wasn’t actually a doctor, Mundiveen admitted: in the days of the former Coronal Lord Thrykeld he had been a mining engineer, whose special responsibility in the government was supervision of the sparse mineral resources that the giant but metal-poor world of Majipoor had to offer. Once his days at court had ended—and he offered no information about that—he had lived in retirement in Deepenhow Vale, farther down the Mount from Stee, where somehow he had picked up a few medical skills, and then he had found it best to leave the Mount entirely and wander off toward the west, coming eventually to the forests of this northwestern region. There, as he put it, he “made himself useful as a physician to the Piurivars.”

Carefully, during the course of the evening, Stiamot nudged Mundiveen into telling him some tales of life in the Shapeshifter encampments in the forests surrounding Domgrave. He learned something about their tribal arrangements—they had a single monarch, he said, the Danipiur, who in some fashion ruled over all the scattered bands of Piurivars everywhere in the world—and a little, though it was not very articulately expounded, about their religious beliefs. In a muddled, sketchy way Mundiveen related also a Piurivar myth, the legend of some dreadful ancient sin they had committed at the old Shapeshifter capital of Velalisier long before the first human settlers had arrived, a sin so grievous that it had brought a curse down on them and led directly to the downfall of the race.

Stiamot supposed that someone who had as little liking for mankind as Mundiveen apparently did would have made a compensating shift in the other direction, taking refuge among the Metamorphs as he had because he saw them as the only beings on the planet worth living among, pure and true and noble, altogether undeserving of having lost their planet to the human oppressors who had settled among them six thousand years before. But it was not like that at all. Mundiveen never spoke of the Metamorphs with the sort of scorn that the District Resident had expressed—“sneaky, nasty savages”—but he seemed to have no more fondness for then than he did for humanity, letting slip between the lines, as he told Stiamot one story and another that night, that he found them a difficult, quarrelsome, even treacherous race—“a slippery crew” was the phrase he used—and that much of his medical work consisted of repairing damage that one Metamorph had done to another.

The legend of that ancient sin and the curse evidently had something to do with his attitude toward the Piurivars—the unspeakably evil thing that they had done twenty thousand years ago that had crushed them under the vengeance of their own gods. Whatever that had been, and Mundiveen could not or would not say what it was, the tale seemed to have revealed something about their basic nature to him and mark them in Mundiveen’s eyes as a dark, troublesome lot. But perhaps, Stiamot thought, Mundiveen was inherently incapable of liking anyone at all, and chose to live among the Shapeshifters only because he preferred them, for all their faults, to his own species. Despite his manifold shortcomings, though, Mundiveen had had more first-hand experience of Shapeshifter life than anyone else Stiamot had ever encountered, and in the remainder of his time in Domgrave he intended to learn all that he could about them from the sharp-edged little man.

News of the Coronal’s imminent arrival reached Stiamot two days later. He gathered a troop of peacekeepers and rode out to meet him east of town and escort his party into the city.

Strelkimar, wrapped in that dark cloud that seemed to go with him everywhere, greeted Stiamot in a perfunctory way, acknowledging him curtly with a quick, minimal movement of his hand. The Coronal was a commanding figure of a man, tall and powerfully built, but today he looked tired. That unfathomable darkness that lay at the core of his soul showed through plainly to the surface. Everything about Lord Strelkimar was dark: his eyes, his beard, the black doublet and leggings that he almost always wore, and, thought Stiamot, his soul itself. Stiamot suspected that the strange chain of events that had brought Strelkimar to the summit of power, the abrupt abdication and disappearance of his predecessor and all the whispered gossip that had surrounded the change of rule, had left some indelible mark on him. But all of that had happened before Stiamot’s own time at court; he had heard the stories, of course, but had no hard knowledge of what had really taken place.

“Has your journey been a good one, my lord?” Stiamot asked.

The question was mere routine courtesy, the obligatory sort of thing that a courtier would ask his arriving master. But it seemed to anger the Coronal: Lord Strelkimar’s obsidian eyes flared for a moment, and he scowled as though Stiamot had said something offensive. Then he softened. Stiamot was one of his favorites, after all, though it had appeared to take a moment or two for him to remember that. “These towns are all alike,” he said gruffly. “I’ll be glad to move along through here to Alaisor.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Stiamot. “The sea air will do you good, my lord. But I have a fine lodging waiting for you, and there will be an audience of notables tonight, and a state banquet tomorrow evening.”

“An audience, yes. A banquet. Very good.” The Coronal seemed ten thousand miles away. Stiamot conducted him into town—the whole population had turned out, lining the one main street on both sides—and took him to the Residency, where Kalban Vond greeted him with embarrassing obsequiousness. The Coronal asked to be left alone in his chambers for an hour or two. Stiamot obliged. He was glad to be free of the Coronal’s oppressive presence for a little while. When he returned in late afternoon, Strelkimar seemed refreshed—he had had a bath and changed his clothes, a different black doublet, different black leggings, and he had even donned his crown, that slender shining circlet that was his badge of office and which most of the time he disdained to wear. But his lips were clamped, as ever, in that brooding scowl that he seemed never to shed.

“Well, Stiamot, have you been keeping yourself amused here?”

“This is hardly an amusing place, sir.”

“I suppose not. Seen any Shapeshifters, have you?”

Was that some sort of mocking jab? There was a strange glint in the Coronal’s dark eyes. Stiamot had been a member of the Coronal’s council the past seven years, and was as close to him, quite likely, as anyone. But he never could tell, even after so much time, quite where he stood with Lord Strelkimar. He came from a good family though not one of the great ones, and had risen very swiftly at court through diligence, loyalty, intelligence, and—to some degree—luck, a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Still, the Coronal was a mystery to him. Much of the time he still found Strelkimar an enigma, baffling, opaque, impenetrable. He said warily, “As a matter of fact, I have, my lord. One. Right in the center of town, crossing a street. We stopped and stared at each other for a moment or two. He did a quick little shapeshifting trick, or so I thought. And then he went walking away.”

“Right out in the open,” the Coronal said. “So there are some actually living in this town?”

“I don’t think so. But they’re in the forests all around, and I guess one of them comes drifting through, occasionally.”

“And why is that?” said the Coronal, toying with the starburst decoration on the breast of his doublet.

“I have no idea, sir. But I can try to find out. I’ve met a man here who knows a great deal about them—has lived with them, even, in the forests—and he’s been telling me something about them. I hope to learn more from him.”

“Yes. Yes.” The Coronal peered at his knuckles as though he had never seen his hands before. “The Shapeshifters,” he murmured, after a time. “What an enigma they are, Stiamot. What a puzzle. I will never understand them.”

Stiamot said nothing. An enigma contemplating an enigma was too much for him to deal with.

Brusquely, in an entirely different tone of voice, the Coronal said, “And what time is this audience I’m holding supposed to happen?”

“In two hours, my lord.”

“Can you manage to make it any sooner? I’d like to get it over with.”

“That would be difficult, sir. Some of the planters live a considerable distance from town. I don’t see any way we could—”

“All right. All right, Stiamot.” There was another long pause. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly: “Tomorrow morning, bring me this forest-dweller of yours, this Shapeshifter expert. Maybe he can teach me a thing or two about them.”

Getting Mundiveen to come to a private morning interview with the Coronal was not so easy to accomplish. The little man had already made it clear to Stiamot that he was anything but an early riser; and simply to locate him was a problem. But with the District Resident’s help he tracked Mundiveen to his lair, a little ramshackle cottage in a dreary corner of town, and sent one of his aides in to ascertain whether he was awake. He was, though not happy about it. Fortunately, the Coronal was no early riser either, and his idea of “morning” was more like early afternoon.

Mundiveen seemed taken aback by this summons to the Coronal’s chambers. “Why does he want to see me?”

“I told him you knew a great deal about the Piurivars. He’s interested in them, all of a sudden. At court he hasn’t wanted to talk about them or, maybe, even to think about them, but now, for some reason—please, Mundiveen. You have to come.”

“Do I?”

“He is the Coronal.”

“And he can call me to his side just like that, with a snap of his fingers?”

“Please, Mundiveen. Don’t be difficult.”

“Difficult is what I am, my friend.”

“For me. A favor. Let him ask you a few questions. This is more important than you can possibly know. The future of Majipoor may depend on it.”

“I doubt that. But for me my not seeing him is more important than you can possibly know. Let me be, Stiamot.”

“A few questions, only. I’ve promised him I’ll bring you. Come. Come, Mundiveen.”

“Well—”

Stiamot saw him weakening. Some powerful inner struggle was going on; but as the moments passed Mundiveen’s resistance appeared to be diminishing. Refusing a royal command was evidently something that even the crusty, acerbic Mundiveen was unwilling to do. Or perhaps it was merely the fierce lofty indifference that seemed to underlie everything he said or did, that cosmic shrug with which he faced the world, that led him ultimately to yield.

“Give me half an hour to get myself ready,” Mundiveen said. But the meeting was a brief and unhappy one. Mundiveen was strangely tense and withdrawn during the journey to the Residency, saying almost nothing. He came limping into the Coronal’s chamber with Stiamot beside him, and when he saw Strelkimar he shot a look of such coruscating hatred at him as Stiamot had never seen in human eyes. Strelkimar, who was poring over a sheaf of newly arrived dispatches, took no notice. He barely looked up, greeting Mundiveen with no more than a grunt and a casual glance, and signalled that he wanted to continue reading for a moment. One had to grant a Coronal such whims, but Stiamot knew that Mundiveen was no man to honor even a Coronal’s whim, and half expected him to turn indignantly and leave. Surprisingly, though, he simply stood and waited, a tightly controlled figure, practically motionless, his breath coming in a harsh rasp, and at last the Coronal looked up again. This time, when his eyes met Mundiveen’s, some violent unreadable emotion—shock, anger, despair?—swirled for an instant across Lord Strelkimar’s face. Then it vanished, and was replaced by a steely fixed stare. He stared at Mundiveen with a terrible piercing force that reminded Stiamot of the look that that Metamorph had given him in the street. But despite the grim power of that stare Strelkimar seemed somehow unnerved by Mundiveen’s presence, confounded, dazed.

“You are the expert on Shapeshifters?” the Coronal asked finally, in a low, husky voice.

“If that is what your man tells you, my lord, I will not deny it.”

“Ah. Ah.” A long silence. He was still staring. Another string of unfathomable emotions played across his features, a twitching of his lip, a clenching of his jaw. He was holding some inward debate with himself. Then the Coronal shook his head, slowly, the way a man at the last extremity of exhaustion might shake it. He was barely audible as he said, not to Mundiveen but to Stiamot, “It was a mistake to call him here. This is not a good moment for a meeting. I find myself very weary, this morning.”

“If you say so, my lord.”

“Very weary indeed. The man can go. Perhaps another time, then.”

He made a gesture of dismissal.

Stiamot was dumfounded. To ask that Mundiveen be brought, and then to react like this, and send him away so hastily—!

But Mundiveen did not seem troubled by the discourtesy. If anything, he appeared to be relieved to take his leave of the Coronal. Stiamot saluted and they went from the room, and, outside, Mundiveen said, “I wondered how he’d react when he saw me. Took him a moment to recognize me, I suppose. How awful he looked. By the Divine, what a haunted look there is in that man’s eyes! And for good reason, let me tell you.”

“I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that—” Stiamot paused. “He recognized you, you say? He’s seen you before?” Acidly Mundiveen said, “I told you I was at court, in the time before he was Coronal. And for a little while afterward. You don’t remember my saying that?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I must have forgotten it.”

“I wish I could. We go a long way back, your Coronal and I.” Stiamot passed his hand across his forehead as though to clear it from cobwebs. “You need to tell me what this is all about.”

“I do? I need to? The same way I needed to go and see Lord Strelkimar?”

“For the love of the Divine, Mundiveen—”

Mundiveen let his eyes slip closed for an instant. “All right. Let’s go have a bowl or two of wine, then, and I’ll tell you.”

“Wine? This early in the day?”

“Wine, Prince Stiamot. Or no story.”

“All right,” Stiamot said. “Wine.”

Mundiveen said, “I wasn’t always twisted up like this, you know. In the days when Lord Thrykeld was Coronal I was quite an athlete, as a matter of fact. And when I was on a surveying trip I could walk miles and miles without the slightest fatigue.”

“Back when you were a mining engineer.”

“When I was a mining engineer, yes. At least you remembered that much. I was going to find the world’s biggest iron mine, I thought. Not that Lord Thrykeld cared very much about that. All he cared about, really, was poetry and singing and his Ghayrog favorite. Do you know about that, the Ghayrog? Before your time, I suppose. But no matter. Thrykeld was the Coronal Lord, and I served him as loyally as you seem to serve Strelkimar, and I was going to present him with more iron than had ever been discovered before.”

Mundiveen helped himself liberally to the wine. He seemed calm, icily controlled, betraying no sign of the ferocious rage that had come over him in his first moment in the Coronal’s presence. Stiamot waited, saying nothing.

“The former Coronal, Lord Thrykeld,” Mundiveen said at last. “I suppose history will call him a great fool. You probably know very little about him.”

“Not much, really,” said Stiamot. “Only the standard information.”

“Then you must think he was a great fool. Most people do. Well, probably he was. But he was a gentle, sweet man, with a considerable gift for poetry and music. The people loved him. Everyone loved him. You must have loved him yourself, when you were a boy. But in the third or fourth year of his reign something began to change in him. There was this Ghayrog at court, a certain Valdakko, some sort of conjurer, I think. The Coronal spent more and more time with him, and then he brought him into the Council. Well, that was a little unusual, a Ghayrog in the Council. There never had been one before. They have equality under the law, of course, but they are reptilian, you know. Their metabolisms aren’t like ours and neither are their minds. Thrykeld’s cousin Strelkimar was High Counsellor then, and I can tell you, he wasn’t pleased when the Coronal began to jump this Valdakko up like that. He took it as well as anyone could, though. But when Thrykeld decided that he wanted the Ghayrog to be High Counsellor in Strelkimar’s place, things got, shall we say, a little tense.”

“I heard about that,” Stiamot said. “The Ghayrog as High Counsellor.”

Mundiveen had finished his first bowl of wine, though Stiamot had had only a few sips of his. He went to work on a second one, savoring the wine, pondering it, seemingly lost in recollection of a far-off time. At length he began to speak again. “Strelkimar was very diplomatic about it all, at least outwardly. He behaved as though his cousin was just going through a phase. He loved Thrykeld, you know—as I said, we all loved him; a kind, good man—but gradually it became clear that the Coronal had become unstable, was slipping over, in fact, into a kind of megalomania.” Mundiveen went on to describe how, urged on by his Ghayrog counsellor, Lord Thrykeld had promulgated a law giving him the power to annul any previous statute without consent of the Council. This was absolutism; it was something entirely new in the history of the world. Strelkimar and a few of the other counsellors then made their objections known, objected very strongly, Mundiveen said, and Thrykeld—a Thrykeld none of them had ever known before—retaliated immediately, dismissing the entire Council except for the Ghayrog. He intended to rule, he announced, by personal decree.

“Strelkimar confronted him on that, of course,” Mundiveen said. “Thrykeld flew into a rage. No one had ever seen him even mildly angry before. He ordered Strelkimar banished to Suvrael and all his possessions confiscated.”

Astounded, Stiamot said, “I never heard a thing about that. It was never made public, was it?”

“Of course not. No one beyond the Council ever knew anything about it. Except me.”

“You weren’t a Council member.”

“No. But I was very close to the Coronal. To his cousin, too. And I was stupid enough to try to intervene in the crisis. I got between them: I told Lord Thrykeld that it was very dangerous to try to strip a great prince like Strelkimar of his estates, and I went to Strelkimar and begged him to be patient, to wait his cousin’s madness out, even to go into exile for a time until things calmed down. I was the very soul of moderation and conciliation. So of course they both turned on me.”

Stiamot signalled for another flask of wine. The little man seemed to have an infinite capacity.

“It was impossible to reason with the Coronal,” Mundiveen said, when he was sated for the moment. “He was far gone in his lunacy and the only person he would listen to was the Ghayrog. He drove me from his side. Strelkimar now let it be known that he felt the Coronal would have to be set aside, for the good of the whole commonwealth. I opposed him on that. I felt I had no choice about it. I went to him and said that Thrykeld was undoubtedly behaving very strangely, but no Coronal had ever been removed from office in all the history of the world; that to depose one would be an offense against the Divine; that all of this would surely blow over in a little while. No, said Strelkimar, his cousin was hopelessly mad. He intended to push him aside. I made the error of getting very excited. I swore great purple oaths that I would stand beside the anointed Coronal no matter what Strelkimar did. I threatened to go to the people with word that Strelkimar was planning to overthrow their monarch. I vowed to fight him every step of the way. My behavior was extremely rash. I forbade him to depose Thrykeld. Imagine that! Saying a thing like that to a man like Strelkimar. I became as crazy as Thrykeld himself was, I suppose.”

He fell silent. The silence stretched for a minute or more. When it began to seem as though he did not intend to resume at all, Stiamot prodded him:

“And—?”

“And that evening three hired thugs wearing masks came for me and took me from Stee to someplace far downslope, Furible or Stipool or one of those cities, and there they beat me until both they and I were sure that I was at the edge of death, and then they left me. But I didn’t die. They badly damaged me, but I lived. All they did was cripple me, as you see. Or did you think I was born with my backbone all askew like this?”

“Strelkimar’s men, were they?”

“They didn’t go to the trouble of telling me that. Make your own guesses.”

“And the next thing to do was killing Lord Thrykeld, I suppose,” said Stiamot, wondering whether he had fallen into some dream.

“Oh, no, nothing like that. They killed the Ghayrog, yes, but the Coronal was persuaded to sign a document of abdication. I can just imagine how he was persuaded, too. In his statement he declared that his health had unfortunately become too poor to permit him to continue to meet his royal responsibilities, and so he was withdrawing from the throne and going off to live in Suvrael. He sent a separate message to the Pontifex Gherivale, urging him most strongly to appoint Strelkimar as the new Coronal. So it was done; and Thrykeld left the palace; and then we heard the regrettable news that Thrykeld’s ship had been sunk by a sea-dragon en route to Suvrael, as you probably remember, and that was that. As for me, I suspected that it would not be a smart idea to return to the capital. In fact I discovered, when I had begun to recover from what your Coronal’s men had done to me, that I had lost all interest in the company of my own species, and I was years in recovering even a little of it. So I floated off quietly into the forests and took up my new career as a doctor to the Piurivars.” He paused again a moment and stared thoughtfully into his wine bowl. Then, looking up, he gave Stiamot a sharp sidelong glance. “Is there anything else you’d like to know, now?”

“No,” Stiamot said. “I think I’ve heard too much already.”

These revelations had rocked him like an earthquake.

He had known, of course, that Lord Thrykeld had given up his throne, pleading incapacity to serve, and that soon afterward he had been lost at sea. He had suspected, as many people did, that there probably had been more to the change of monarchs than that, that the forceful and charismatic Lord Strelkimar very likely had been instrumental in his cousin’s decision to abdicate, though he had taken the tale of Thrykeld’s deteriorating health at face value. But Mundiveen’s tale of strife at court, of ultimatum and counter-ultimatum between the cousins, of the forcible overthrow of a king—and of Mundiveen’s own near-fatal beating—gave the history of the years just before his own arrival at court a darker hue than he ever could have imagined. It all fit together now, Mundiveen’s sour cynicism, Strelkimar’s haunted, guiit-stricken eyes, the awkwardness and strangeness of the meeting of the two men this morning, so many years after all those terrible events. Lord Strelkimar lived daily with the knowledge that he had stolen the throne; Mundiveen lived daily with his fury and pain. And Stiamot had stupidly brought the two of them face to face.

“Now,” Mundiveen said, “tell me what your Lord Strelkimar wants to know about the Piurivars.”

“We want to find a solution to the problem of how we are going to live with them in the years to come, how we are going to share the planet. The Council is split in various ways, putting forth all sorts of ideas ranging from a geographical separation of the races to an all-out war of extermination. I myself hope to find some middle course. The Coronal hasn’t been taking part in our discussions up to now, but he seems to have come around to an awareness that we need to deal with the issue. And so, in my innocence, I told him that I had encountered someone who had intimate knowledge of the Piurivar way of life, and he asked me to bring you to speak with him. Not knowing, of course, that that man was you.”

“The truth must have come as a great surprise to him.”

“Something of a shock, I would say.”

Mundiveen smiled balefully. “Well, so be it. If he had allowed me to tell him anything, I would have said that there’s no good solution to be found. Humans and Piurivars are never going to get along, my friend. Believe me. Never. Never”

The formal state banquet was held as scheduled that evening, in the municipal festival hall, a lofty wooden structure with an arching roof far above. Planters had come in from all about, drawn by the novelty of a Coronal in their midst. A high table had been set up where the Coronal, in full royal regalia, sat flanked by members of his entourage, a duke or two, a couple of Council members, a sprinkling of Pontifical officials. District Resident Kalban Vond sat at the Coronal’s right hand—the greatest honor ever accorded him, Stiamot supposed.

Just as the first course was being served Stiamot heard the sounds of a commotion outside, shouts, angry cries. Alarmed, he rushed to the window.

A struggle of some kind was going on right outside the hall. Stiamot saw bursts of flame limned against the night, shadowy figures running about. Looking back at the high table, he saw the Coronal sitting altogether motionless, frowning, lost once again in the darkness of his own thoughts. He seemed entirely unaware that anything unusual might be taking place. But the District Resident beside him looked stricken and aghast. His mouth was agape; his soft, fleshy face seemed to be sagging.

Then, unexpectedly, astonishingly, a side door that Stiamot had not noticed before opened and Mundiveen came limping in. After what had passed between the Coronal and him this morning, he was the last person, perhaps, whom Stiamot expected to see in the banqueting hall tonight. Flushed, panting, he made his way laboriously to Stiamot’s side at the window.

“Metamorphs,” he said hoarsely. “Disguised as townsfolk. Knives under their cloaks. They’re throwing firebrands.” Stiamot looked out again. In the chaos beyond the window he was able to make out the guards attempting to form a phalanx. They were surrounded on three sides by a host of cloaked figures in rapid motion, flickering, changing dizzyingly from one shape to another as they moved.

He seized Mundiveen by the shoulder. “What is this?”

“The beginning of the insurrection, I think. They want to burn the building down.”

“The Coronal—!”

“Yes, the Coronal.”

“I’m going out there,” said Stiamot. “I have to do something.”

“No one can do anything. Especially not you.”

Hesitating only a moment, Stiamot said, “Well, then, what about you? Even in the darkness, they’ll recognize you. And you could talk to them. They trust you if they trust anybody. You’ve done so many things for them. Explain to them now that this is insane, that they have to withdraw or they’ll all die, that the Coronal is too well guarded.”

Mundiveen glared at him scornfully. “Why would they care about that? They’re beyond all caring about anything. Don’t you see, Stiamot, there’s no hope? This is a war to the death, beginning right now, right here, and it will never end, at least not until you people recognize that you have no choice but to eradicate them altogether.”

His words hit Stiamot with the force of a punch. You people? Did Mundiveen, then, think that he stood outside the human race? You have to eradicate them altogether? This, from a man who had spent so many years living among them? Stiamot faltered, speechless.

But then, abruptly, between one instant and the next, Mundiveen’s expression changed. A flash of something new came into his eyes, a wild, almost gleeful look, something Stiamot had never seen in them before. “All right,” he said, with a savage, twisted grin. “As you wish, my friend. I’ll go to them. I’ll talk to them.”

“But—wait—wait a moment, Mundiveen—”

Mundiveen broke free of Stiamot’s grasp and ran from the hall.

By now the Coronal seemed to have realized that there was trouble of some sort; he had half-risen from his seat and was looking questioningly toward Stiamot. Stiamot beckoned urgently to him to sit down. His figure would be too conspicuous this way if the Metamorphs succeeded in breaking into the hall.

Then he returned his attention to the window. Mundiveen had somehow succeeded in getting through the line of guards. Stiamot could see his small, angular form, moving clumsily and with great difficulty but even so at remarkable speed into the midst of the attackers. He was visible for a moment, his hands lifted high as though he were calling for their attention. Then the Shapeshifters swarmed in around him, surrounding him, yelling so loudly that their fierce incomprehensible cries penetrated the walls of the building. Stiamot had a fragmentary glimpse or two of Mundiveen tottering about at the center of their group, and then, as Stiamot watched in horror, they closed their circle tightly about him and Mundiveen seemed to melt, to vanish, to disappear entirely from view.

In the morning, after order had been restored and the bodies cleared away, and while the preparations for the Coronal’s departure from Domgrave were being made, Lord Strelkimar called Stiamot to his side.

The Coronal was so pale that the blackness of his beard seemed to have doubled and redoubled in the night. His hands were shaking. He had not dressed; he wore only a casual robe loosely girt, and a flask of wine stood before him on the table.

Stiamot said at once, “My lord, the Shapeshifters—”

Strelkimar waved him to silence with an impatient gesture. “Forget the Shapeshifters for a moment, Stiamot, and listen to me. There’s news from the Labyrinth.” Lord Strelkimar’s voice was a ragged thread, the merest fragment of sound. Stiamot had to strain to hear him. “A message came to me in the afternoon, just as I was getting dressed for the banquet. The Pontifex Gherivale has died. It was a peaceful end, I am told. This has been a day of great surprises, and they are not yet over, my lord.”

My lord? My lord? Had he lost his mind?

Blinking in confusion, Stiamot said, “What are you saying, my lord?”

“Don’t call me ‘my lord.’ That’s you, Stiamot. I am Pontifex, now.”

“And I am—?” The startling implications began to sink in, and his mind swirled in a jumble of wonder and disbelief. This was unthinkable. “Do I understand you correctly, my lord? How can this be? You are asking me—me—”

“We are in need of a new Coronal. There’s a vacancy in the position. The succession must be maintained.”

“Yes, of course. But—Coronal—me? Surely you aren’t serious. Consider how young I am!” He felt as though he were moving in a dream. “There are counsellors much senior to me. What about Faninal? What about Kreistand?”

“They’ll be disappointed, I suppose. But we need a Coronal, right away, and we need a young one. You’ll be fighting the war against the Shapeshifters for the rest of your life.”

“The war?” said Stiamot leadenly.

“Yes, of course, the war. Your war. The war that we pretended for so long wasn’t coming, and which has now arrived. And happy I am to be able to hand it to you and hide myself away in the Labyrinth. I have enough sins on my soul for one lifetime.” Strelkimar rose. He loomed over Stiamot, a big man, heavy-muscled, deep-chested, still young himself. His face was bloodless with fatigue. Stiamot saw what might have been tears glistening at the corners of Strelkimar’s eyes. “Come, man. Let’s go out to the others and give them the news.”

Stiamot nodded like one who moves in a trance. As it all sank in, the meaning of the bloody events of the night before, the change of government at the Labyrinth, his own precipitous rise to the Coronal’s throne, he knew that Strelkimar was right about the coming of the war. He had known that it was coming from the moment of Mundiveen’s death, or even a little earlier. There is no hope, the little man had said, before running from the banquet hall to yield himself up to his doom. This was something new, an attack on the Coronal himself, and it would not stop there. This is a war to the death. The uneasy peace that had obtained so long between human and Metamorph was at its end. And this was the end of the line, too, for Stiamot’s own dreams of a moderate middle course, of some peaceful resolution of the Metamorph problem. The races must be separated, he thought, or else one of them must be exterminated; and now that high power had been thrust upon him, he would choose the lesser of the two evils.

“Come,” Strelkimar said again. “I have to introduce the new Coronal to them. Come with me, Lord Stiamot.”

The war began in earnest in the spring. It ended in victory in the thirtieth year of Lord Stiamot’s reign.