Valentine Pontifex

1

Millilain would always remember the day when the first of the new Coronals proclaimed himself, because that was the day she paid five crowns for a couple of grilled sausages.

She was on her way at noon to meet her husband Kristofon at his shop on the esplanade by Khyntor Bridge. It was the beginning of the third month of the Shortage. That was what everyone in Khyntor called it, the Shortage, but inwardly Millilain had had a more realistic name for it: the famine. No one was starving—yet—but no one was getting enough to eat, either, and the situation seemed to be worsening daily. The night before last, she and Kristofon had eaten nothing but some porridge he had made out of dried calimbots and a bit of ghumba root. Tonight’s dinner would be stajja pudding. And tomorrow—who knew? Kristofon was talking of going hunting for small animals, mintuns, droles, things of that sort, in Prestimion Park. Filet of mintun? Roast breast of drole? Millilain shuddered. Lizard stew would be next, probably. With boiled cabbage-tree leaves on the side.

She came down Ossier Boulevard to the place where it turned into Zimr Way, which led to the bridge esplanade. And just as she passed the Proctorate office the unmistakable and irresistible aroma of grilled sausages came to her.

I’m hallucinating, she thought. Or dreaming, maybe.

Once there had been dozens of sausage peddlers along the esplanade. But not for weeks, now, had Millilain seen one. Meat was hard to come by these days: something about cattle starving in the western ranching country for lack of forage, and livestock shipments from Suvrael, where things still seemed to be all right, being disrupted by the sea-dragon herds that were thronging the maritime lanes.

But the smell of those sausages was very authentic. Millilain stared in all directions, seeking its source.

Yes! There!

No hallucination. No dream. Incredibly, astoundingly, a sausage peddler had emerged onto the esplanade, a little stoop-shouldered Liiman with a dented old cart in which long red sausages hung skewered over a charcoal fire. He was standing there just as if everything in the world were exactly as it had always been. As if there were no Shortage. As if the food shops had not gone on a three-hour-a-day schedule, because that was usually how long it took them to sell out everything they had in stock.

Millilain began to run.

Others were running too. From all sides of the esplanade they converged on the sausage peddler as though he were giving away ten-royal pieces. But in fact what he had to offer was far more precious than any shiny silver coin could be.

She ran as she had never run before, elbows flailing, knees coming up high, hair streaming out behind her. At least a hundred people were heading toward the Liiman and his cart. He couldn’t possibly have enough sausages for everyone. But Millilain was closer than anyone else: she had seen the vendor first, she was running the hardest. A long-legged Hjort woman was coming up close behind her, and a Skandar in an absurd business suit was thundering in from the side, grunting as he ran. Who could ever have imagined a time, Millilain wondered, when you’d run to buy sausages from a street vendor?

The Shortage—the famine—had started somewhere out west, in the Rift country. At first it had seemed unimportant and almost unreal to Millilain, since it was happening so far away, in places that were themselves unreal to her. She had never been west of Thagobar. When the first reports came in, she had felt a certain abstract compassion for the people who were said to be going hungry in Mazadone and Dulorn and Falkynkip, but it was hard for her to believe that it was actually happening—nobody ever went hungry on Majipoor, after all—and whenever word came of some new crisis out west, a riot or a mass migration or an epidemic, it struck her as being remote not only in space but in time, not something taking place right this moment but more like something out of a history book, an event of Lord Stiamot’s time, say, thousands of years ago.

But then Millilain began to find that there were days when things like niyk and hingamorts and glein were in short supply at the places where she shopped. It’s because of the crop failures out west, the clerks told her: nothing much is coming out of the Rift farm belt any longer, and it’s a slow and costly business to ship produce in from other areas. After that, such basic things as stajja and ricca suddenly were being rationed, even though they were grown locally and there had been no disruptions of agriculture in the Khyntor region. The explanation this time was that surplus food stocks were being shipped to the afflicted provinces; we must all make sacrifices in such a time of dire need, et cetera, et cetera, said the imperial decree. Then came the news that certain of the plant diseases had shown up around Khyntor also, and east of Khyntor as far downriver as Ni-moya. Allotments of thuyol and ricca and stajja were cut in half, lusavender disappeared entirely from sale, meat began to become scarce. There was talk of bringing in supplies from Alhanroel and Suvrael, where apparently everything was still normal. But that was only talk, Millilain knew. There weren’t enough cargo ships in the whole world to carry produce from the other continents in quantities big enough to make a difference, and even if there were, the cost would be prohibitive. “We’re all going to starve,” she told Kristofon.

So the Shortage reached Khyntor at last.

The Shortage. The famine.

Kristofon didn’t think anyone would really starve. He was always optimistic. Somehow things will get better, he said. Somehow. But here were a hundred people desperately converging on a sausage vendor.

The Hjort woman tried to pass her. Millilain hit her hard with her shoulder and knocked her sprawling. She had never hit anyone before. She felt a strange lightheaded sensation, and a tightness in her throat. The Hjort screamed curses at her, but Millilain ran on, heart pounding, eyes aching. She jostled someone else aside and elbowed her way into the line that was forming. Up ahead, the Liiman was handing out sausages in that strange impassive Liiman way, not at all bothered, it seemed, by the struggling mob in front of him.

Tensely Millilain watched the queue moving forward. Seven or eight in front of her—would there be enough sausages for her? It was hard to see what was going on up there, whether new skewers were going on the fire as the old ones were sold. Would there be any left for her? She felt like a greedy child worrying if there were enough party favors to go around. I am being very crazy, she told herself. Why should a sausage matter so much? But she knew the answer. She had had no meat at all for three days, unless the five strips of dried salted sea-dragon flesh she had found on Starday while prowling in her cupboard qualified as meat, and she doubted that. The aroma of those sizzling sausages was powerfully attractive. To be able to purchase them was suddenly the most important thing in the world for her, perhaps the only thing in the world.

She reached the head of the line.

“Two skewers,” she said.

“One to a customer.”

“Give me one, then!”

The Liiman nodded. His three intense, glowing eyes regarded her with minimal interest. “Five crowns,” the Liiman said.

Millilain gasped. Five crowns was half a day’s pay for her. Before the Shortage, she remembered, sausages had been ten weights the skewer. But that had been before the Shortage, after all.

“You aren’t serious,” she said. “You can’t charge fifty times the old price. Even in times like these.”

Someone behind her yelled, “Pay up or move out, lady!”

The Liiman said calmly, “Five crowns today. Next week, eight crowns. Week after that, a royal. Week after that, five royals. Next month, no sausages any price. You want sausages? Yes? No?”

“Yes,” Millilain muttered. Her hands were trembling as she gave him the five crowns. Another crown bought her a mug of beer, flat and stale. Feeling drained and stunned, she drifted away from the line.

Five crowns! That was what she might have expected to pay for a complete meal in a fine restaurant, not very long ago. But most of the restaurants were closed now, and the ones that remained, so she had heard, had waiting lists weeks long for tables. And the Divine only knew what kind of prices they were charging now. But this was insane. A skewer of sausages, five crowns! Guilt assailed her. What would she tell Kristofon? The truth, she decided. I couldn’t resist, she’d say. It was an impulse, a crazy impulse. I smelled them cooking on the grill, and I couldn’t resist.

What if the Liiman had demanded eight crowns, though, or a royal? Five royals? She couldn’t answer that. She suspected that she would have paid whatever she had to, so strong had the obsession been.

She bit into the sausage as though she feared someone would snatch it from her hand. It was astonishingly good: juicy, spicy. She found herself wondering what sort of meat had gone into it. Best not to consider that, she told herself. Kristofon might not be the only one who had had the idea of hunting for little animals in the park.

She took a sip of the beer and began to raise the skewer to her mouth again.

“Millilain?”

She looked up in surprise. “Kristofon!”

“I was hoping I’d find you here. I closed the shop and came out to see what that mob was all about.”

“A sausage vendor appeared suddenly. As though a wizard had conjured him up.”

“Ah. Yes, I see.”

He was staring at the half-eaten sausage in her hand.

Millilain forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Kris. Do you want a bite?”

“Just a bite,” he said. “I suppose it won’t do to get back on the line.”

“I think they’ll all be sold in a little while.” She handed him the skewer, working hard at concealing her reluctance, and watched tensely as he nibbled an inch or two of the sausage. She felt intense relief, and more than a little shame, as he gave the rest back to her.

“By the Lady, that was good!”

“It ought to have been. It cost five crowns.”

“Five—”

“I couldn’t help myself, Kris. Picking up the scent of them in the air—I was like a wild animal, getting on that line. I pushed, I shoved, I fought. I think I would have paid almost anything for one. Oh, Kris, I’m so sorry!”

“Don’t apologize. What else is there to spend the money on, anyway? Besides, things will be changing soon. You’ve heard the news this morning?”

“What news?”

“About the new Coronal! He’ll be here any minute. Right here, coming across Khyntor Bridge.”

Bewildered, she said, “Has Lord Valentine become Pontifex, then?”

Kristofon shook his head. “Valentine no longer matters.

They say he’s disappeared—carried off by the Metamorphs, or something. In any case it was proclaimed about an hour ago that Sempeturn is Coronal now.”

“Sempeturn? The preacher?”

“That one, yes. He arrived in Khyntor last night. The mayor has backed him, and I hear the duke has fled to Ni-moya.”

“This is impossible, Kris! A man can’t just stand up and say he’s Coronal! He has to be chosen, he has to be anointed, he has to come from Castle Mount—”

“We used to think so. But these are different times. Sempeturn’s a true man of the people. That’s the sort we need now. He’ll know how to win back the favor of the Divine.”

She stared in disbelief. The sausage dangled, forgotten, in her hand. “It can’t be happening. It’s craziness. Lord Valentine is our anointed Coronal. He—”

“Sempeturn says that he’s a fraud, that the whole story of his having switched bodies is nonsense, that we’re being punished with these plagues and famines because of his sins. That the only way we can save ourselves now is to depose the false Coronal and give the throne to someone who can lead us back to righteousness.”

“And Sempeturn says he’s the man, and therefore we’re supposed to bow down and accept him and—”

“He’s coming now!” Kristofon cried.

His face was flushed, his eyes were strange. Millilain could not remember ever having seen her husband in such a state of high excitement. He was almost feverish. She felt feverish herself, confused, dazed. A new Coronal? That little red-faced rabble-rouser Sempeturn sitting on the Confalume Throne? She couldn’t grasp the idea. It was like being told that red was green, or that water henceforth would flow uphill.

There was the sudden sound of strident music. A marching band in green-and-gold costumes that bore the Coronal’s starburst emblem came strutting across the bridge and down the esplanade. Then came the mayor and other city officials; and then, riding in a grand and ornately embellished open palanquin, smiling and accepting the plaudits of a vast crowd that was following him out of the town of Hot Khyntor on the far side of the bridge, a short florid-looking man with thick unruly dark hair. “Sempeturn!” the crowd roared. “Sempeturn! All hail Lord Sempeturn!”

“All hail Lord Sempeturn!” Kristofon bellowed.

This is a dream, Millilain thought. This is some dread sending that I do not understand.

“Sempeturn! Lord Sempeturn!”

Everyone on the esplanade was shouting it now. A kind of frenzy was spreading. Millilain numbly took the last bite of her sausage, swallowed it without tasting anything, let the skewer drop to the ground. The world seemed to be rippling beneath her feet. Kristofon still shouted, in a voice now growing hoarse, “Sempeturn! Lord Sempeturn!” The palanquin was going past them now: only twenty yards or so separated them from the new Coronal, if that was indeed what he was. He turned and looked straight into Millilain’s eyes. And with amazement and steadily gathering terror she heard herself yell, “Sempeturn! All hail Lord Sempeturn!” along with all the others.

2

“He’s going where?” Elidath said in astonishment.

“Ilirivoyne,” said Tunigorn once more. “He set out three days ago.”

Elidath shook his head. “I hear your words, and they make no sense to me. My mind will simply not accept them.”

“By the Lady, neither will mine! But that doesn’t make it any the less true. He means to go before the Danipiur, and beg her forgiveness for all our sins against her people, or some such madness.”

It was only an hour since Elidath’s ship had docked in Piliplok. He had sped at once to the great hall of the city hoping still to find Valentine there, or, at the worst, just embarking on his way toward Ni-Moya. But no one of the royal party was at the hall save Tunigorn, whom he found morosely shuffling papers in a small dusty office. And this tale that Tunigorn had to tell—the grand processional abandoned, the Coronal venturing into the wild jungles where the Shapeshifters lived—no, no, it was too much, it was beyond all reason!

Fatigue and despair pressed against Elidath’s spirit like monstrous boulders, and he felt himself succumbing to that crushing weight.

Hollowly he said, “I chased him halfway around the world to prevent something like this from happening. Do you know what my journey was like, Tunigorn? Night and day by floater to the coast, without ever halting a moment. And then racing across a sea full of angry dragons, that three times came so close to our cruiser I thought they were going to sink us. And finally to reach Piliplok half dead with exhaustion, only to hear that I’ve missed him by three days, that he’s gone off on this absurd and perilous adventure, when perhaps if I had moved only a little more swiftly, if I had set out a few days sooner—”

“You couldn’t have changed his mind, Elidath. No one could. Sleet couldn’t, Deliamber couldn’t, Carabella couldn’t—”

“Not even Carabella?”

“Not even Carabella,” said Tunigorn.

Elidath’s despair deepened. He fought it fiercely, refusing to let himself be overwhelmed by fear and doubt. After a time he said, “Nevertheless, Valentine will listen to me, and I’ll be able to sway him. Of that much I’m certain.”

“I think you deceive yourself, old friend,” Tunigorn said sadly.

“Why did you summon me, then, for a task you thought was impossible?”

“When I summoned you,” Tunigorn said, “I had no idea what Valentine had in mind. I knew only that he was in an agitated state and was considering some rash and strange course of action. It seemed to me that if you were with him on the processional you might be able to calm him and divert him from whatever he planned. By the time he let us know his intentions, and made us see that nothing could swerve him from them, you were long since on your way west. Your journey has been wasted, and I have only my regrets to offer you.”

“I’ll go to him, all the same.”

“You’ll accomplish nothing, I’m afraid.”

Elidath shrugged. “I’ve followed him this far: how can I abandon the quest now? Maybe there’s some way I can bring him to his senses after all. You say you’re planning to set out after him tomorrow?”

“At midday, yes. As soon as I’ve dealt with the last of the dispatches and decrees that I stayed behind to handle.”

Elidath leaned forward eagerly. “Take them with you. We need to go tonight!”

“That wouldn’t be wise. You told me yourself that your voyage had exhausted you, and I see the weariness in your face. Rest here in Piliplok this evening, eat well, sleep well, dream well, and tomorrow—”

“No!” Elidath cried. “Tonight, Tunigorn! Every hour we waste here brings him that much closer to Shapeshifter territory! Can’t you see the risks?” He stared coolly at Tunigorn. “I’ll leave without you, if I have to.”

“I would not permit that.”

Elidath lifted his eyebrows. “Is my travel subject to your permission, then?”

“You know what I’m saying. I can’t let you head off into nowhere by yourself.”

“Then come with me tonight.”

“Wait only until tomorrow?”

“No!”

Tunigorn closed his eyes a moment. After a time he said quietly, “All right. So be it. Tonight.”

Elidath nodded. “We’ll hire a small, fast vessel, and with luck we’ll overtake him before he gets to Ni-moya.”

Tunigorn said bleakly, “He isn’t traveling toward Ni-moya, Elidath.”

“I don’t understand. The only way from here to Ilirivoyne that I know is up the river past Ni-moya to Verf, is it not, and southward from Verf to Piurifayne Gate.”

“I only wish he had gone that way.”

“Why, what other route is there?” Elidath asked, surprised.

“None that makes any sense. But he devised it himself: southward into Gihorna, and then across the Steiche into Metamorph country.”

Elidath stared. “How can that be? Gihorna’s an empty wasteland. The Steiche is an impassable river. He knows that, and if he doesn’t, his little Vroon certainly does.”

“Deliamber did his best to discourage the idea. Valentine wouldn’t listen. He pointed out that if he went by way of Ni-moya and Verf, he’d be obliged to halt at every city along the way for the usual ceremonies of the grand processional, and he doesn’t want to delay his pilgrimage to the Metamorphs that long.”

Elidath felt himself engulfed by dismay and alarm. “And so he means to wander through the sandstorms and miseries of Gihorna—and then find a way across a river that has already once nearly drowned him—”

“Yes, and all so he can pay a call on the people who successfully managed to push him off his throne ten years ago—”

“Madness!”

“Madness indeed,” Tunigorn said.

“You agree? We set out tonight?”

“Tonight, yes.”

Tunigorn put forth his hand, and Elidath took it and clasped it tight, and they stood in silence a moment.

Then Elidath said, “Answer me one question, will you, Tunigorn?”

“Ask it.”

“You used the word ‘madness’ more than once, in speaking of this venture of Valentine’s, and so did I. And so it is. But I have not seen him in a year or more, and you have been with him ever since he left the Mount. Tell me this: do you think he has truly gone mad?”

“Mad? No, I think not.”

“Appointing young Hissune to the principate? Making pilgrimages to the Metamorphs?”

Tunigorn said, after a time, “Those are not things you or I would have done, Elidath. But I think they are signs not of Valentine’s madness, but of something else in him, a goodness, a sweetness, a kind of holiness, that such as you and I are not fully able to understand. We have always known this about Valentine, that he is different from us in certain ways.”

Frowning, Elidath said, “Better holy than mad, I suppose. But this goodness, this holiness: do you think those are the qualities that Majipoor most needs in its Coronal, as this time of strife and bewilderment unfolds?”

“I have no answer to that, old friend.”

“Nor I. But I have certain fears.”

“As do I,” said Tunigorn. “As do I.”

3

In the darkness Y-Uulisaan lay awake and tense, listening to the wind as it roared across the wastelands of Gihorna: a thin, cutting wind from the east that scoured up a swirl of damp sand and hurled it insistently against the sides of the tent.

The royal caravan with which he had been traveling so long was camped now many hundreds of miles southwest of Piliplok. The River Steiche lay no more than another few days’ journey ahead, and beyond it was Piurifayne. Y-Uulisaan longed desperately to cross the river at last and breathe the air of his native province once more, and the closer the caravan came to it the more acute that longing grew. To be home again among his own, free of the strain of this unending masquerade—

Soon—soon—

But first he must warn Faraataa, somehow, of Lord Valentine’s plans.

It was six days now since Faraataa last had made contact with Y-Uulisaan, and six days ago Y-Uulisaan had not known that the Coronal intended to undertake a pilgrimage into Piurivar country. Surely Faraataa had to have that information. But Y-Uulisaan had no reliable means of reaching him, whether through conventional channels, which were virtually nonexistent in this dreary and all but uninhabited place, or via the water-king communion. It took many minds to gain a water-king’s attention, and Y-Uulisaan was alone on this mission.

All the same, he could try. As he had done on each of the last three nights he focused the energies of his mind and hurled them forth, straining to initiate some sort of contact across the thousand miles or so that separated him from the leader of the rebellion.

—Faraataa? Faraataa?

Hopeless. Without the aid of a water-king as an intermediary, transmission of this sort was all but impossible. Y-Uulisaan knew that. Yet he went on attempting to call. Perhaps—so he compelled himself to believe—there might be some slight chance that a passing water-king would pick up the transmission and amplify it. A slight chance, a negligible chance, but one he dared not fail to assay.

—Faraataa?

Y-Uulisaan’s shape wavered slightly under the effort. His legs lengthened, his nose diminished in size. Grimly he checked the change before it could become perceptible to any of the others in the tent, and compelled himself back to the human form. Since first assuming it in Alhanroel he had not dared to relax his shape even for a moment, lest they discover him for the Piurivar spy he was. Which created a pressure within him that by this time had become well-nigh intolerable, but he held himself to his chosen form.

He continued to pump his soul’s force outward into the night.

—Faraataa? Faraataa?

Nothing. Silence. Solitude. The usual.

After a while he abandoned the attempt and tried to sleep. Morning was still distant. He lay back and closed his throbbing eyes.

But sleep would not come for him. Sleep rarely did, in this journey. At best he could manage only a shallow fitful doze. There were too many distractions: the harshness of the wind, the sound of wind-driven sand pelting against canvas, the rough snuffling breathing of the members of the Coronal’s entourage who shared this tent with him. And above all the ever-present numbing pain of his isolation among these hostile alien folk. Taut, strung tight, he waited for the coming of dawn.

Then somewhere between the Hour of the Jackal and the Hour of the Scorpion he felt the sound of a droning, insinuating music brush lightly against his mind. So taut was he that the startling intrusion robbed him for an instant of his shape-stability: he went fluttering uncontrollably through a range of forms, mimicking two of the sleeping humans nearby, then tumbling into the Piurivar form for a fraction of a second before regaining mastery of himself. He sat up, heart thundering, breath ragged, and searched for that music again.

Yes. There. A dry, whining tone, sliding strangely between the intervals of the scale. He recognized it now as the mind song of a water-king, unmistakable in its quality and timbre even though he had never heard the song of this particular water-king before. He opened his mind to contact, and an instant later, with enormous relief, he heard the mind-voice of Faraataa:

—Y-Uulisaan?

—At last, Faraataa! How long I’ve waited for this call!

—It comes at the appointed time, Y-Uulisaan.

—Yes, that I know. But I have had urgent news for you. I’ve catted out to you night after night, trying to make contact before this. You heard nothing?

—I heard nothing. This is the regular call.

—Ah.

—Where are you, Y-Uulisaan, and what is your news?

—I am somewhere in Gihorna, far down the coast from Piliplok and well inland, almost at the Steiche. I travel still with the Coronal’s party.

—And can it be that the grand processional has taken him into Gihorna?

—He has given over the processional, Faraataa. He journeys now toward Ilirivoyne, to hold conference with the Danipiur.

In response came silence, a silence so crisp and hard that it crackled like the lightning energies, with a sizzling hissing sound beneath it. Y-Uulisaan wondered after a time if contact had been lost altogether. But finally Faraataa said:

—The Danipiur? What would he want from her?

—Forgiveness.

—Forgiveness for what, Y-Uulisaan?

—All of the crimes of his people against ours.

—He has gone mad, then?

—Some of his followers do think that. Others say that it is only Valentine’s way, to meet hatred with love.

There was another long silence.

—He must not speak with her, Y-Uulisaan.

—So I believe also.

—This is not a time for forgiveness. This is a time for strife, or we will have no victory. I will keep him from her. He must not meet with her. He may attempt to arrive at a compromise with her, and there must be no compromises!

—I understand.

—Victory is almost ours. The government is collapsing. The rule of order is breaking up. Do you know, Y-Uulisaan, that three false Coronals have arisen? One has proclaimed himself in Khyntor, and another in Ni-moya, and one in Dulorn.

—Is it true?

—Most certainly it is. You know nothing of it?

—Nothing. And I think Valentine knows nothing of it either. We are very far from civilization here. Three false Coronals! It is the beginning of the end for them, Faraataa!

—So we believe. All moves well for us. The plagues continue to spread. With your help, Y-Uulisaan, we have been able to find ways of countering the government’s counter-measures, and making matters ever worse. Zimroel is in chaos. The first serious troubles have begun to arise in Alhanroel. Victory is ours!

—Victory is ours, Faraataa!

—But we must intercept the Coronal as he moves toward Ilirivoyne. Tell me your precise location, if you can.

—We have gone by floater southwest from Piliplok toward the Steiche for three days. I heard someone this evening say that the river is no more than two days’ journey from us, perhaps less. Yesterday the Coronal himself and a few of his followers set out for it ahead of the main body of the caravan. They must be nearly there by this time.

—And how does he plan to cross it?

—That I do not know. But —

“Now! Grab him!”

At the sudden outcry all contact with Faraataa was lost. Two huge forms loomed in the darkness and pounced. Y-Uulisaan, astonished, unprepared, gasped in surprise.

He perceived that it was the vast warrior-woman Lisamon Hultin and the fierce shaggy Skandar Zalzan Kavol who gripped him. The Vroon Deliamber hovered somewhere at a safe distance, tentacles coiling in intricate patterns.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Y-Uulisaan demanded. “This is an outrage!”

“Ah, that it is,” replied the Amazon cheerfully. “Most certainly it is.”

“Let go of me at once!”

“Very small chance of that, spy!” the Skandar rumbled.

Desperately Y-Uulisaan tried to free himself from the grasp of his assailants, but he was like a mere doll in their hands. Panic seized him, and he felt his form-control begin to break down. He could do nothing to reassert it, though the loss of it revealed him for what he truly was. They held him as he writhed and twisted and frantically ran through a host of shapechanges, becoming now this creature or that, this mass of spines and knobs or that length of sinuous serpent. Unable to free himself, his energies so depleted by the contact with Faraataa that he could not generate any of his defensive abilities, the electric shocks and the like, he screamed and roared in frustration until, abruptly, the Vroon slipped a tentacle against his forehead and administered a short stunning jolt. Y-Uulisaan went limp and lay half conscious.

“Take him to the Coronal,” Deliamber said. “We will interrogate him in Lord Valentine’s presence.”

4

As he rode westward toward the Steiche all that day with the vanguard of the royal caravan, Valentine saw the landscape hourly undergoing dramatic change: drab Gihorna was giving way to the mysterious lushness of the Piurifayne rain forest. Behind him lay a scruffy seacoast of dunes and sand drifts, of sparse shaggy tufts of saw-edged grass and small stunted trees with limp yellow leaves. Now the soil was no longer so sandy, but grew ever darker, ever more rich, and supported a riotous lushness of growth; the air no longer carried the acrid flavor of the sea, but had taken on the sweet, musky aroma of a jungle. Yet this was mere transitional country, Valentine knew. The true jungle lay ahead, beyond the Steiche, a realm of mists and strangeness, dense dark greenery, fog-swept hills and mountains: the kingdom of the Shapeshifters.

An hour or so before twilight they reached the river. Valentine’s floater was the first to arrive at it, the other two appearing a few minutes later. He signaled to their captains to pull the vehicles into parallel formation along the bank. Then he left his floater and walked to the water’s edge.

Valentine had reason to remember this river well. He had come to it in his years of exile, that time when he and his fellow jugglers were fleeing the wrath of the Metamorphs of Ilirivoyne. Now, standing beside its swift waters, his mind journeyed back across time to glimpse again that wild ride across rain-soaked Piurifayne, and the bloody battle with Shapeshifter ambushers in the depths of the jungle, and the little apelike forest brethren who had saved them afterward by leading them to the Steiche. And then the terrifying and ill-fated raft ride down the turbulent river, among its menacing boulders and whirlpools and rapids, in the hope of reaching the safety of Ni-moya—

But here there were no rapids, no fanged rocks splitting the swirling surface, no high rocky walls flanking the channel. The river here was fast of flow, but broad and smooth and manageable.

“Can this really be the Steiche?” Carabella asked. “It hardly seems to be the same river that gave us such pain.”

Valentine nodded. “All that lies north of here. This stretch of the river seems more civil.”

“But hardly gentle. Can we get across?”

“We must,” said Valentine, staring at the distant western bank and Piurifayne beyond it.

Dusk was beginning to descend now, and in the gathering darkness the Metamorph province seemed impenetrable, unfathomable, hermetic. The Coronal’s mood began to turn somber once more. Was it folly, he wondered, this wild expedition into the jungle? Was this enterprise absurd, naive, foredoomed? Perhaps so. Perhaps the only outcome of his rash quest for the Shapeshifter queen’s forgiveness would be mockery and shame. And perhaps then he would do well to resign this crown that he had never truly coveted, and turn the government into the hands of some more brutal and decisive man.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

He noticed that some strange sluggish creature had emerged from the water on the other shore and was moving slowly about over there at the river’s edge—a long, baggy-bodied thing with pale blue skin and a single huge sad eye at the top of its blunt, bulbous head. As Valentine watched, bemused by the ugliness and clumsiness of the animal, it put its face to the muddy soil of the bank and began rocking from side to side, as though trying to excavate a pit with its chin.

Sleet approached. Valentine, entirely caught up in observing the odd beast across the way, allowed him to wait in silence a moment before turning to him.

It seemed to Valentine that Sleet’s expression was pensive, even troubled. He said, “We’re going to pitch camp here for the night, is that right, lordship? And wait until morning before we try to see if the floaters will travel over water that moves as fast as this?”

“So I intend, yes.”

“With all respect, my lord, you might consider crossing the river tonight, if it’s possible.”

Valentine frowned. He felt curiously detached: Sleet’s words appeared to be reaching him from a great distance. “As I recall, our plan was to spend tomorrow morning experimenting with the floaters, but to wait on this side of the river until the other half of the caravan had caught up with us before making the actual crossing into Piurifayne. Is that not so?”

“Yes, my lord, but—”

Valentine cut him off “Then the order should be given to pitch camp before it’s dark, eh, Sleet?” The Coronal put the issue from his mind and turned back toward the river. “Do you see that peculiar animal on the far bank?”

“The gromwark, you mean?”

“Is that what it is? What do you think it’s up to, rubbing its face in the ground like that?”

“Digging a burrow, I’d say. To hunker down in when the storm strikes. They live in the water, you know, but I suppose it figures the river will be too badly stirred up, and—”

“Storm?” Valentine asked.

“Yes, my lord. I was trying to tell you, my lord. Look at the sky, my lord!”

“The sky darkens. Night’s coming on.”

“Look to the east, I mean,” said Sleet.

Valentine swung around and stared into Gihorna. The sun should already be nearly down, back there; he would have expected the sky to have turned gray or even black by this time of day. But instead a weird kind of sunset seemed to be going on in the east, against all nature: a strange pastel glow streaked the sky, pink tinged with yellow, and pale green at the horizon. The colors had an odd throbbing intensity, as though the sky were pulsating. The world seemed extraordinarily still: Valentine heard the rushing of the river, but no other sound, not even the nightfall song of birds or the insistent high-pitched notes of the little scarlet tree-frogs that dwelled here by the thousands. And there was a desert dryness to the air, a combustible quality.

“Sandstorm, my lord,” Sleet said quietly.

“Are you certain?”

“It must be blowing up just now, on the coast. The wind was out of the east all day, and that’s where the Gihorna storms come from, off the ocean. A dry wind off the ocean, lordship, can you reckon that? I can’t.”

“I hate a dry wind,” Carabella murmured. “Like the wind the dragon hunters call ‘the sending.’ It makes my nerves ache.”

“You know of these storms, my lord?” Sleet asked.

Valentine nodded tensely. A Coronal’s education is rich in the details of geography. The sandstorms of Gihorna occurred infrequently but were widely notorious: fierce winds that skinned the dunes like knives, and scooped up tons of sand and carried them with resistless ferocity toward the inland regions. They came but twice or thrice in a generation, but they were long remembered when they did.

“What will happen to our people back there?” Valentine asked.

Sleet said, “The storm’s sure to pass right over them. It may be upon them already, or if not, it’ll be there before long. Gihorna storms are swift. Listen, lordship: listen!”

A wind was rising.

Valentine heard it, still far away, a low hissing sound that had just now begun to intrude itself upon the unnatural silence. It was like the first quiet whisper of an awakening giant’s slowly mounting fury that plainly was soon to give way to some awesome devastating roaring.

“And what of us?” Carabella said. “Will it reach this far, Sleet?”

“The gromwark thinks so, my lady. It seeks to wait things out underground.” To Valentine Sleet said, “Shall I advise you, my lord?”

“If you will.”

“We should cross the river now, while we still can. If the storm comes over us, it may destroy the floaters, or so badly disable them that they will be unable to travel on water.”

“More than half my people are still in Gihorna!”

“If they still live, yes.”

“Deliamber—Tisana—Shanamir—!”

“I know, my lord. But we can do nothing for them now. If we are to continue this expedition at all, we must cross the river, and later that may be impossible. On the far side we can hide in the jungle, and camp there until the others rejoin us, if ever they do. But if we stay here we may be pinned down forever, unable to go forward, unable to retreat.”

A grim prospect, Valentine thought; and a plausible one. But nevertheless he hesitated, still reluctant to go on into Piurifayne while so many of his closest and dearest ones faced an uncertain fate under the lash of the wind-driven Gihorna sands. For an instant he felt the wild urge to order the floaters back toward the east, in order to search for the rest of the royal party. A moment’s reflection told him of the folly of that. There was nothing he could achieve by going back at this moment except to put even more lives in jeopardy. The storm might yet not reach this far west; in that case it would be best to wait until its rage was spent, and then reenter Gihorna to pick up the survivors.

He stood still and silent, bleakly looking eastward into that realm of darkness now so strangely illuminated by the frightening glow of the sandstorm’s destructive energies.

The wind continued to gain in force. The storm will reach us, Valentine realized. It will sweep over us and perhaps plunge on deep into the Piurifayne jungles as well, before its power is dissipated.

Then he narrowed his eyes and blinked in surprise and pointed. “Do you see lights approaching? Floater lights?”

“By the Lady!” Sleet muttered hoarsely.

“Are they here?” Carabella asked. “Do you think they’ve escaped the storm?”

“Only one floater, my lord,” said Sleet quietly. “And not one from the royal caravan, I think.”

Valentine had arrived at that conclusion at the same moment. The royal floaters were huge vehicles, capable of holding many people and much equipment. What was coming toward them now out of Gihorna appeared to be more like a small private floater, a two- or four-passenger model: it had only two lights in front, casting no very powerful beam, where the larger ones had three, of great brilliance.

The floater pulled to a halt no more than thirty feet from the Coronal. At once Lord Valentine’s guards rushed forward to surround it, holding their energy-throwers at the ready. The doors of the floater swung open and two men, haggard, exhausted, came stumbling out.

Valentine gasped in astonishment. “Tunigorn? Elidath?”

It seemed impossible: a dream, a fantasy. Tunigorn at this moment should still have been in Piliplok, dealing with routine administrative chores. And Elidath? How could this be Elidath? Elidath belonged thousands of miles away, atop Castle Mount. Valentine no more expected to encounter him in this dark forest on Piurifayne’s border than he would his own mother the Lady.

Yet that tall man with the heavy brows and the deep-cleft chin was surely Tunigorn; and that other, taller still, he of the piercing eyes and the strong, broad-boned face, was surely Elidath. Unless—unless—

The wind grew more powerful. It seemed to Valentine that thin gritty pennons of sand now rode upon it.

“Are you real?” he demanded of Elidath and Tunigorn. “Or just a pair of cunning Shapeshifter imitations?”

“Real, Valentine, real, altogether real!” cried Elidath, and held forth his arms toward the Coronal.

“By the Divine, it is the truth,” Tunigorn said. “We are no counterfeits, and we have traveled day and night, my lord, to overtake you in this place.”

“Yes,” Valentine said, “I think you are real.”

He would have gone toward Elidath’s outstretched arms, but his own guards uncertainly interposed themselves. Angrily Valentine waved them aside and pulled Elidath into a close embrace. Then, releasing him, he stepped back to survey his oldest and closest friend. It was well over a year since last they had met; but Elidath seemed to have aged ten years for one. He looked frayed, worn, eroded. Was it the cares of the regency that had ground him down in this way, Valentine wondered, or the fatigue of his long journey to Zimroel? Once he had seemed to Valentine like a brother, for they were of an age with one another and of much the same cast of soul; and now Elidath was suddenly transformed into a weary old man.

“My lord, the storm—” Sleet began.

“A moment,” Valentine said, brusquely gesturing him away. “There’s much I must learn.” To Elidath he said, “How can it be that you are here?”

“I came, my lord, to beg you not to go further into peril.”

“What gave you to think I was in peril, or entering more deeply into it?”

“The word came to me that you were planning to cross into Piurifayne and speak with the Metamorphs,” said Elidath.

“That decision was only lately taken. You must have left the Mount weeks or even months before the idea came into my mind.” In some irritation Valentine said, “Is this your way of serving me, Elidath? To abandon your place at the Castle, and journey unbidden halfway round the world to interfere with my policies?”

“My place is with you, Valentine.”

Valentine scowled. “Out of love for you I bid you greeting and offer my embrace. But I wish you were not here.”

“And I the same,” said Elidath.

“My lord,” said Sleet insistently. “The storm is coming upon us now! I beg you—”

“Yes, the storm,” Tunigorn said. “A Gihorna sandstorm, terrible to behold. We heard it raging along the coast as we set out after you, and it has followed us all the way. An hour, half an hour, perhaps less, and it will be here, my lord!”

Valentine felt a tight band of tension encase his chest. The storm, the storm, the storm! Yes, Sleet was right: they must take some action. But he had so many questions—there was so much he must know—

To Tunigorn he said, “You must have come by way of the other camp. Lisamon, Deliamber, Tisana—are they safe?”

“They will try to protect themselves as best they can. And we must do the same. Head west, try to take cover in the depths of the jungle before the worst of it reaches here—”

“My counsel exactly,” Sleet said.

“Very well,” said Valentine. He looked to Sleet and said, “Have our floaters made ready for the crossing.”

“I will, my lord.” He rushed away.

To Elidath Valentine said, “If you are here, who rules at the Castle?”

“I chose three to serve as a Council of Regency: Stasilaine, Divvis, and Hissune.”

“Hissune?”

Color came to Elidath’s cheeks. “It was my belief you wished him to move rapidly forward in the government.”

“So I do. You did well, Elidath. But I suspect that there were some who were less than totally pleased with the choice.”

“Indeed. Prince Manganot of Banglecode, and the Duke of Halanx, and—”

“Never mind the names. I know who they are,” Valentine said. “They’ll change their minds in time, I think.”

“As do I. The boy is astonishing, Valentine. Nothing escapes his notice. He learns amazingly swiftly. He moves surely. And when he makes a mistake, he knows how to gain from an understanding of his error. He reminds me somewhat of you, when you were his age.”

Valentine shook his head. “No, Elidath. He’s not at all like me. That’s the thing I most value about him, I think. We see the same things, but we see them with very different eyes.” He smiled and caught Elidath by the forearm, and held him a moment. Softly he said, “You understand what I intend for him?”

“I think I do.”

“And are you troubled by it?”

Elidath’s gaze was steady. “You know that I am not, Valentine.”

“Yes. I do know that,” the Coronal said.

He dug his fingers hard into Elidath’s arm, and released him, and turned away before Elidath could see the sudden glistening in his eyes.

The wind, now thick with sand and howling eerily, came ripping through the grove of slender-stemmed trees that lay just to the east, cutting their broad leaves to tatters like a host of invisible knives. Valentine felt light showers of sand striking his face with stinging impact, and he turned from it, pulling his cloak up to protect himself. The others were doing the same. At the edge of the river, where Sleet was supervising the conversion of the floaters’ ground-effect mechanisms for use on water, there was a great bustle of activity.

Tunigorn said, “There is much strange news, Valentine.”

“Speak it, then!”

“The agricultural expert who has been traveling with us since Alaisor—”

“Y-Uulisaan? What of him? Has something happened to him?”

“He is a Shapeshifter spy, my lord.”

The words reached Valentine like blows.

“What?”

“Deliamber detected it in the night: the Vroon felt a strangeness somewhere, and prowled about until he found Y-Uulisaan holding mind-speech with someone far away. He instructed your Skandar and the Amazon to seize him, and when they did, Y-Uulisaan began changing forms like a trapped demon.”

Valentine spat in fury. “It goes beyond belief! All these weeks, carrying a spy with us, confiding in him all our plans for overcoming the blights and plagues of the farm provinces— no! No! What have they done with him?”

“They would have brought him to you this night for interrogation,” said Tunigorn. “But then the storm came, and Deliamber thought it wisest to wait it out at the camp.”

“My lord!” Sleet called from the riverbank. “We are ready to attempt the crossing!”

“There is more,” Tunigorn said.

“Come. Tell me about it as we ride across.”

They hurried toward the floaters. The wind now was without mercy, and the trees leaned halfway to the ground under its brunt. Carabella, beside Valentine, stumbled and would have gone sprawling if he had not caught her. He wrapped one arm tightly about her: she was so slight, so buoyant, that any gust might carry her away.

Tunigorn said, “Word of new chaos reached Piliplok just as I set forth. In Khyntor a man named Sempeturn, an itinerant preacher, has proclaimed himself Coronal, and some of the people have acclaimed him.”

“Ah,” Valentine said softly, as though struck in the middle.

“That is not all. Another Coronal has arisen in Dulorn, they say: a Ghayrog named Ristimaar. And we have word of still another in Ni-moya, though his name did not come to me; and it is reported also that at least one false Pontifex has come forth in Velathys, or possibly Narabal. We are not sure, my lord, because the channels of communications have become so disturbed.”

“It is as I thought,” said Valentine in a tone of deadly quiet. “The Divine has in all truth turned against us. The commonwealth is shattered. The sky itself has broken and will fall upon us.”

“Into the floater, my lord!” Sleet shouted.

“Too late,” Valentine murmured. “There will be no forgiveness for us now.”

As they scrambled into the vehicles the full fury of the storm broke upon them. First there was an odd moment of silence, as though the atmosphere itself had fled from this place in terror of the onrushing winds, taking with it all capacity for the transmission of sound; but in the next instant came something like a thunderclap, but dull and without resonance, like a short swift unechoing thud. And on the heels of that arrived the storm, screaming and snarling and turning the air opaque with churning whirlwinds of sand.

Valentine was in the floater by then, with Carabella close beside him and Elidath not far away. The vehicle, clumsily swaying and lumbering like some great amorfibot rousted unwilling from the dune where it had been dozing, drifted riverward and moved out over the water.

Darkness now had come, and within the darkness lay a weird, glowing core of purplish-green light that seemed almost to have been kindled by the force of air flowing over air. The river had turned altogether black and its surface was rippling and swelling alarmingly as sudden calamitous changes in the air pressure above it tugged or thrust against it. Sand pelted down in wild cyclonic sprays, etching pock-marked craters on the heaving water. Carabella gagged and choked; Valentine fought back an overwhelming dizziness; the floater bucked and reared in a berserk, unruly way, nose rising and slapping down against the water and rising again, and again slapping down, thwack thwack thwack. The cascading sand etched patterns of a curious loveliness in the windows, but rapidly it became all but impossible to see through them, though Valentine had the hazy impression that the floater just to the left of his was standing on its tail, balanced immobile in an impossible position for a frozen moment before starting to slip down into the river.

Then everything outside the floater was invisible, and the only sounds that could be heard were the booming of the wind and the steady, abrasive drumbeat of the sand against the floater’s hull.

An odd tranquilizing giddiness began to possess Valentine. It seemed to him that the floater was pivoting rhythmically now along its longitudinal axis, jerking from side to side in ever more abrupt yawing shrugs. Very likely, he realized, the ground-effect rotors were losing whatever little purchase they had had on the river’s wildly unstable surface, and in another few moments the vehicle would surely flip over.

“This river is accursed,” said Carabella.

Yes, Valentine thought. So it did seem. The river was under some dark spell, or else the Steiche was itself some malevolent spirit that sought his doom. And now we will all drown, he thought. But he was curiously calm.

The river, which nearly had me once but somehow allowed me to be cast forth to safety, he told himself, has waited all this while for a second chance. And now that chance has come.

It did not matter. In the final analysis nothing really mattered. Life, death, peace, war, joy, sadness: they were all one and the same, words without meaning, mere noises, empty husks. Valentine felt no regret for anything. They had asked him to serve, and he had served. Surely he had done his best. He had shirked no task, betrayed no trust, forsworn no oath. Now would he return to the source, for the winds had driven the river wild, and the river would devour them all, and so be it: it did not matter. It did not matter.

“Valentine!”

A face, inches from his own. Eyes looking into his. A voice, crying a name that he thought he knew, and crying it again.

“Valentine! Valentine!”

A hand gripping his arm. Shaking him, pushing him.

Whose face? Whose eyes? Whose voice? Whose hand?

“He seems in a trance, Elidath.”

Another voice. Lighter, clearer, close by his side. Carabella? Yes. Carabella. Who was Carabella?

“There’s not enough air in here. Vents choked by sand—we’ll smother if we don’t drown!”

“Can we get out?”

“Through the safety hatch. But we’ve got to snap him out of this. Valentine! Valentine!”

“Who is it?”

“Elidath. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You seem half asleep. Here, let me get that safety belt loose. Get up, Valentine! Get up. The floater’s going to sink in another five minutes.”

“Ah.”

“Valentine, please, listen to him!” It was the other voice, the light one, the Carabella voice. “We’re turning over and over. We have to get out of here and swim to shore. It’s the only hope we have. One of the floaters has already gone down, and we can’t see the other one, and—oh, Valentine, please! Stand up! Take a deep breath! That’s it. Another. Another. Here, give me your hand—hold his other one, Elidath; we’ll lead him to the hatch—there—there—just keep moving, Valentine—”

Yes. Just keep moving. Valentine became aware of tiny currents of air flowing past his face. He heard the faint spattering of sand as it fell from above. Yes. Yes. Crawl up here, wriggle past this, put your foot here, the other one here—step—step—hold this—pull— pull—

He clambered upward like an automaton, still only vaguely comprehending what was taking place, until he reached the top of the emergency ladder and poked his head out through the safety hatch.

A sudden blast of fresh air—hot, dry, thick with sand—swept brutally across his face. He gasped, breathed sand, swallowed sand, gagged, spat. But he was awake again. Clinging to the flange that rimmed the hatch, he stared out into the storm-riven night. The darkness was intense; the weird glow had greatly diminished; sprays of sand still whipped unrelentingly through the air, one howling vortex after another, battering against his eyes, his nostrils, his lips.

It was almost impossible to see. They were somewhere in midriver, but neither the eastern nor western bank was visible. The floater was tipped high on end, in an awkward and precarious way, rising half its length out of the savage chaos of the river. There was no sign of the other floaters. Valentine thought he saw heads bobbing about in the water, but it was hard to be sure: the sand veiled everything and merely to keep his eyes open was an agony.

“Down here! Jump, Valentine!” Elidath’s voice.

“Wait,” he called. He looked back. Carabella stood below him on the ladder, pale, frightened, almost dazed. He reached for her and she smiled when she saw that he had returned to himself, and he pulled her up beside him. She came in one quick bound and balanced beside him on the rim of the hatch, agile as an acrobat, no less trim and sturdy than she had been in her juggling days.

The sand choking the air was unendurable. They locked their arms together and jumped.

Hitting the water was like striking a solid surface. For a moment he clung to Carabella, but as they landed she was ripped from him. Valentine felt himself pushing down through the water until he was all but engulfed in it; then he kicked downward and recoiled and forced his way to the top. He called out for Carabella, Elidath, Sleet, but he saw no one, and even down here there was no place to hide from the sand, which fell like a burdensome rain and thickened the river to a diabolical turbidity.

I could almost walk to shore on this, Valentine thought.

He made out the dim hugeness of the floater to his left, sliding slowly downward into the water: there was still enough air in it to give it some buoyancy, and the bizarre, puddinglike consistency of the sand-glutted river provided some slight resistance to its entry, but yet the floater was plainly sinking, and Valentine knew that when it went under entirely it would kick up a perilous backlash nearby. He struggled to get away, looking about all the while for his companions.

The floater vanished. A great wave rose and struck him.

He was thrust under, came up briefly, went down again as a second wave hit him and then an eddying whirlpool sucked at his legs. He felt himself being swept downstream. His lungs were afire: full of water, full of sand? The apathy that had come over him aboard the doomed floater was altogether gone from him now; he kicked, wriggled, fought to stay afloat. He collided with someone in the darkness, clutched at him, lost hold, went under again. This time nausea overwhelmed him, and he thought he would never come up; but he felt strong arms seize him and begin to tow him, and he let himself go limp, for he understood that this frantic resistance to the river was an error. He breathed more easily, and drifted easily at the surface. His rescuer released him, disappearing into the night, but Valentine saw now that he was close to one of the river’s banks, and in a stunned, weary way he pulled himself forward until he felt his waterlogged boots touching bottom. Slowly, as if he were marching through a river of syrup, he plodded shoreward, emerged on the muddy bank, and dropped down face first. He wished he could burrow like the gromwark into the wet earth and hide until the storm had passed by.

After a time, when he had caught his breath, he sat up and looked about. The air was still gritty with sand, but not so much so that he needed to cover his face, and the wind definitely seemed to be subsiding. A few dozen yards downstream from him lay one of the floaters, beached at the river’s edge; he saw nothing of the other two. Three or four limp figures were sprawled nearby; alive or dead, he could not say. Voices, faint and dim, resounded in the distance. Valentine was unable to tell whether he was on the Piurifayne side of the river or the Gihorna, though he suspected he was in Piurifayne, for it seemed to him that a wall of all but impenetrable foliage rose just behind him.

He got to his feet.

“Lordship! Lordship!”

“Sleet? Here!”

The small, lithe figure of Sleet appeared out of the darkness. Carabella was, with him, and Tunigorn not far behind. Solemnly Valentine embraced each of them. Carabella was shivering uncontrollably, though the night was warm, and had grown humid now that the parched wind had blown itself out. He drew her against him, and tried to brush away the patches of wet sand that clung to her clothes, as to his, like a thick constricting crust.

Sleet said, “My lord, two of the floaters are lost, and I think a good many of their passengers with them.”

Valentine nodded grimly. “So I fear. But surely not all!”

“There are some survivors, yes. As I came to you I heard their voices. Some—I have no idea how many—scattered along both banks. But you must prepare yourself, my lord, for losses. Tunigorn and I saw several bodies along the shore, and very likely there are others who were swept downstream and drowned far away. When morning comes we’ll know more.”

“Indeed,” Valentine said, and fell silent a while. He sat crosslegged on the ground, more like a tailor than a king, and fell into a long silence, drawing his hand idly through the sand that lay heaped as though it were some strange kind of snow to a depth of some inches on the ground. There was one question he dared not ask, but after a time he could no longer keep it within himself. He glanced up at Sleet and Tunigorn and said, “What news is there of Elidath?”

“None, my lord,” said Sleet gently.

“None? None at all? Has he not been seen, or heard?”

Carabella said, “He was beside us in the water, Valentine, before our floater went down.”

“Yes. I remember that. But since then?”

“Nothing,” said Tunigorn.

Valentine gave him a quizzical look. “Has his body been found, and are you not telling me?”

“By the Lady, Valentine, you know as much as I about what has happened to Elidath!” Tunigorn blurted.

“Yes. Yes. I do believe you. This frightens me, not knowing what has become of him. You know he means much to me, Tunigorn.”

“You think you need to inform me of that?”

Valentine smiled sadly. “Forgive me, old friend. This night has unsettled my mind some, I do believe.” Carabella put her hand, cool and damp, over his; and he put his other on hers. Quietly he said again, “Forgive me, Tunigorn. And you, Sleet, and you, Carabella.”

“Forgive you, my lord?” Carabella asked, amazed. “For what?”

He shook his head. “Let it pass, love.”

“Do you blame yourself for what has happened tonight?”

“I blame myself for a great deal,” said Valentine, “of which what has happened tonight is but a small part, though to me it is a vast catastrophe. The world was given into my stewardship, and I have led it to disaster.”

“Valentine, no!” Carabella cried.

“My lord,” said Sleet, “you are much too harsh on yourself!”

“Am I?” He laughed. “Famine in half of Zimroel, and three false Coronals proclaiming themselves, or is it four, and the Metamorphs coming around to collect their overdue reckoning, and here we sit at the edge of Piurifayne with sand in our craws and half our people drowned and who knows what dread fate overtaking the other half, and—and—” His voice was beginning to crack. With an effort he brought it under control, and himself, and said more calmly, “This has been a monstrous night, and I am very weary, and it worries me that Elidath has not appeared. But I will not find him by talking this way, will I? Will I? Come, let us rest, and wait for morning, and when morning comes we will begin to repair all that can yet be repaired. Eh?”

“Yes,” said Carabella. “That sounds wise, Valentine.”

There was no hope of sleep. He and Carabella and Sleet and Tunigorn lay close by one another, sprawled out in the sand, and the night passed in wakefulness amid a welter of forest sounds and the steady rumble of the river. Gradually dawn crept upon them out of Gihorna, and by that early gray light Valentine saw what horrendous destruction the storm had wrought. On the Gihorna side of the river, and for a short distance into Piurifayne, every tree had been stripped of its leaves, as if the wind had breathed fire, leaving only pitiful naked trunks. The ground was heaped with sand, strewn thinly in some places, piled high into miniature dunes in others. The floater in which Tunigorn and Elidath had arrived still sat upright on the far side of the river, but its metal skin had been scoured and pitted to a dull matte finish. The one floater that remained of Valentine’s own caravan lay on its side like a dead sea dragon cast up by the waves.

One group of survivors, four or five of them, sat together on the opposite bank; half a dozen more, mainly Skandars of the Coronal’s personal bodyguard, were camped just downslope from Valentine; some others could be seen walking about a hundred yards or so to the north, evidently searching for bodies. A few of the dead had been laid out neatly in parallel rows beside the overturned floater. Valentine did not see Elidath among them. But he had little hope for his old friend, and he felt no emotion, only a chill numb sensation beneath his breastbone, when shortly after dawn one of the Skandars appeared, carrying Elidath’s burly body in his four arms as easily as though he held a child.

“Where was he?” Valentine asked.

“Half a mile downstream, my lord, or a little farther.”

“Put him down, and begin seeing about graves. We will bury all our dead this morning, on that little rise overlooking the river.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Valentine peered down at Elidath. His eyes were closed, and his lips, slightly parted, seemed almost to turn upward in a smile, though it might just as easily be a grimace, Valentine thought. “He looked old last night,” he said to Carabella. And to Tunigorn he said, “Did you not think also that he had aged greatly this past year? But now he seems young again. The lines are gone from his face: he might be no more than twenty-four. Does it not seem that way to you?”

“I blame myself for his death,” Tunigorn said in a flat empty voice.

“How so?” Valentine asked sharply.

“It was I who called him down off Castle Mount. Come, I said, hurry to Zimroel: Valentine is contemplating strange deeds, though I know not what they are, and you alone can discourage him from them. And he came: and now see him. If he had stayed at the Castle—”

“No, Tunigorn. No more of this.”

But in a stunned dreamlike way Tunigorn went on, apparently uncontrollably, “He would have been Coronal when you went on to the Labyrinth, and he would have lived long and happily at the Castle, and ruled wisely, and now—instead—instead—”

Gently Valentine said, “He would not have been Coronal, Tunigorn. He knew that, and he was content. Come, old friend, you make his death harder for me with this foolish talk. He is with the Source this morning, which with all my heart I would not have wished happen for another seventy years, but it has happened, and it cannot be undone, however much we talk of it and maybe and what might have been. And we who have lived through this night have much work to do. So let us begin it, Tunigorn. Eh? Eh? Shall we begin?”

“What work is that, my lord?”

“First, these burials. I will dig his grave myself, with my own hands, and let no one dare say me no to that. And when all that is done, you must find your way back across the river, and go in that little floater of yours eastward into Gihorna, and see what has become of Deliamber and Tisana and Lisamon and the rest of them, and if they live, you must bring them here, and lead them onward to me.”

“And you, Valentine?” said Tunigorn.

“If we can right this other floater, I will continue on deeper into Piurifayne, for I still must go to the Danipiur, and say certain things to her that are long overdue to be said. You will find me in Ilirivoyne, as was my first intention.”

“My lord—”

“I beg you. No more talk. Come, all of you! We have graves to dig, and tears to shed. And then we must complete our journeys.” He looked once more to Elidath, thinking, I do not yet believe that he is dead, but I will believe it soon. And then there will be one more thing for which I will need forgiveness.

5

In early afternoon, before the regular daily Council meetings, Hissune made a practice of wandering by himself through the outlying reaches of the Castle, exploring its seemingly infinite complexities. He had lived atop the Mount long enough now so that the place no longer intimidated him, indeed was starting to feel very much like his true home: his Labyrinth life now seemed most distinctly a closed chapter of his past, encapsulated, sealed, stored away in the recesses of his memory. But yet he knew that even if he dwelled at the Castle fifty years, or ten times fifty, he would never come to be truly familiar with it all.

No one was. No one, Hissune suspected, ever had been. They said it had forty thousand rooms. Was that so? Had anyone made an accurate count? Every Coronal since Lord Stiamot had lived here and had tried to leave his own imprint on the Castle, and the legend was that five rooms were added every year, and it was eight thousand years since Lord Stiamot first had taken up residence on the Mount. So there might well be forty thousand rooms here—or fifty thousand, or ninety thousand. Who could tell? One could tally a hundred rooms a day, and a year would not be enough to count them all, and by year’s end a few new rooms would have been added somewhere anyway, so it would become necessary to search them out and add them to the list. Impossible. Impossible.

To Hissune the Castle was the most wondrous place in the world. Early in his stay here he had concentrated on coming to know the innermost zone, where the main court and the royal offices were, and the most famous buildings, Stiamot Keep and Lord Prestimion’s Archive and Lord Arioc’s Watchtower and Lord Kinniken’s Chapel and the grand ceremonial chambers that surrounded the magnificent room the centerpiece of which was the Confalume Throne of the Coronal. Like any greenhorn tourist from the back woods of Zimroel, Hissune had gone over and over those places, including a good many that no greenhorn tourist would ever be allowed to see, until he knew every corner of them as well as any of the tour guides who had spent decades leading visitors through them.

The central reaches of the Castle, at least, were complete for all time: no one could build anything significant there any longer without first removing some structure erected by a past Coronal, and to do such a thing was unthinkable. Lord Malibor’s trophy room had been the last building to go up in the inner zone, so far as Hissune had been able to discover. Lord Voriax in his short reign had constructed only some game courts far out on the eastern flank of the Castle, and Lord Valentine had not yet managed to add any rooms of consequence at all, though he did speak from time to time of building a great botanical garden to house all the marvelous and bizarre plants he had seen during his wanderings through Majipoor—as soon as the pressure of his royal responsibilities, he said, eased enough to allow him to give some serious thought to the project. Judging by the reports of devastation now coming in from Zimroel, Lord Valentine had perhaps waited too long to undertake it, Hissune thought: the blights on that continent were wiping out, so it appeared, not only the agricultural crops but also many of the unusual plants of the wilderness areas.

When he had mastered the inner zone to his own satisfaction Hissune began to extend his explorations to the baffling and almost endless sprawl that lay beyond it. He visited the subterranean vaults that housed the weather machines—designed in ancient times when such scientific matters were better understood on Majipoor—by which the eternal springtime of Castle Mount was maintained, even though the summit of the Mount thrust itself thirty miles above sea level into the chilly dark of space. He wandered through the great library that coiled from one side of the Castle to the other in vast serpentine loops, and was said to contain every book ever published anywhere in the civilized universe. He roamed the stables where the royal mounts, splendid high-spirited synthetic animals very little like their plodding cousins, the beasts of burden of every Majipoori town and farm, pranced and snorted and pawed the air as they waited for their next outing. He made the discovery of Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, a series of linked chambers strung like a chain of sausages around an outjutting spire on the west face of the Mount, the walls and roof of which glowed with eerie radiance, one room a midnight blue, one a rich vermilion, one a subtle aquamarine, one a dazzling tawny yellow, one a somber throbbing russet, and on and on: no one knew why the tunnels had been built, or what was the source of the light that sprang of its own accord from the glistening paving-blocks.

Wherever he went he was admitted without question. He was, after all, one of the three regents of the realm: a surrogate Coronal, in a sense, or at least a significant fraction of one. But the aura of power had begun to settle about him long before Elidath had named him to the triumvirate. He felt eyes on him everywhere. He knew what those intent glances signified. That is Lord Valentine’s favorite. He came out of nowhere; he is already a prince; there will be no limits to his rise. Respect him. Obey him. Flatter him. Fear him. At first he thought he could remain unchanged amidst all this attention, but that was impossible. I am still only Hissune, who gulled tourists in the Labyrinth, who pushed papers about in the House of Records, who was jeered at by his own friends for putting on airs. Yes, that would always be true; but it was also true that he was no longer ten years old, that he had been greatly deepened and transformed by what he had experienced peering into the lives of scores of other men and women in the Registry of Souls, and by the training he had had on Castle Mount, and by the honors and responsibilities—mainly the responsibilities—that had been conferred on him during Elidath’s regency. He walked in a different way now: no longer the cocky but wary Labyrinth boy, always glancing in six directions for some bewildered stranger to exploit, nor the lowly, overworked clerk keeping to his proper place while nonetheless busily scrabbling for promotion to some senior desk, nor the apologetic neophyte bewilderingly thrust among the Powers of the realm and moving cautiously in their midst, but now the rising young lordling, striding with assurance and poise through the Castle, confident, secure, aware of his strengths, his purposes, his destiny. He hoped he had not become arrogant or overbearing or self-important; but he accepted himself calmly and without labored humility for what he had become and what he would be.

Today his route took him into a part of the Castle he had rarely visited, the north wing, which cascaded down a long rounded snout of the Mount’s summit that pointed toward the distant cities of Huine and Gossif. The guards’ residential quarters were here, and a series of beehive-shaped outbuildings that had been built in the reigns of Lord Dizimaule and Lord Arioc for purposes now forgotten, and a cluster of low weatherbeaten structures, roofless and crumbling, that no one understood at all. On his last visit to this zone, months ago, a team of archaeologists had been excavating there, two Ghayrogs and a Vroon overseeing a bunch of Skandar laborers sifting sand for potsherds, and the Vroon had told him then that she thought the buildings were the remnants of an old fort of the time of Lord Damlang, successor to Stiamot. Hissune had come by today to see if they were still at work and find out what they had learned; but the place was deserted, and the excavations had been filled. He stood for a time atop an ancient broken wall, looking toward the impossibly distant horizon, half concealed by the enormous shoulder of the Mount.

What cities lay down this way? Gossif, fifteen or twenty miles along, and below it Tentag, and then, he thought, either Minimool or Greel. And then, surely, Stee of the thirty million citizens, equalled only by Ni-moya in its grandeur.

He had never seen any of those cities, and perhaps he never would. Valentine himself often remarked that he had spent all his life on Castle Mount without finding the occasion to visit Stee. The world was too large for anyone to explore adequately in one lifetime: too large to comprehend, indeed.

And the thirty million folk of Stee, and the thirty million of Ni-moya, and Pidruid’s eleven million, and the millions more of Alaisor, Treymone, Piliplok, Mazadone, Velathys, Narabal: how were they faring this very moment? Hissune wondered. Amid the famines, amid the panics, amid the cries of new prophets and self-appointed new kings and emperors? The situation now was critical, he knew. Zimroel had fallen into such confusion that it was all but impossible to find out what was going on there, though surely it was nothing good. And not long ago had come news of weevils and rusts and smuts and the Divine only knew what else beginning to make their sinister way through the farming belts of western Alhanroel, so in a little while the same madness would very likely be sweeping the senior continent. Already there were rumblings: tales of sea-dragon worship openly conducted in Treymone and Stoien, and mysterious new orders of chivalry, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Fellowship of the Mount and some others, springing up suddenly in cities like Amblemorn and Normork on Castle Mount itself. Ominous, troublesome signs of greater upheaval to come.

There were those who imagined that Majipoor had some inherent immunity to the universal inevitabilities of change, merely because its social system had undergone virtually no important evolution since it had taken its present form thousands of years ago. But Hissune had studied enough of history, both Majipoor’s and that of the mother world Earth, to know that even so placid a population as Majipoor’s, stable and content for millennia, lulled by the kindnesses of its climate and an agricultural fertility capable of supporting an almost unlimited number of people, would tumble with startling swiftness into anarchy and utter disintegration if those comforting props suddenly were knocked away. That had already begun, and it would grow worse.

Why had these plagues come? Hissune had no idea. What was being done to deal with them? Plainly, not enough. Could anything be done? What were rulers for, if not to maintain the welfare of their people? And here he was, a ruler of sorts, at least for the moment, in the grand isolation of Castle Mount, far above a crumbling civilization: badly informed, remote, helpless. But of course the ultimate responsibility for dealing with this crisis did not lie with him. What of Majipoor’s true anointed rulers, then? Hissune had always thought of the Pontifex, buried down there at the bottom of the Labyrinth, as a blind mole who could not conceivably know what was happening in the world—even a Pontifex who, like Tyeveras, might be reasonably vigorous and sane. In fact the Pontifex did not need to keep close touch with events: he had a Coronal to do that, so the theory ran. But Hissune saw now that the Coronal too was cut off from reality, up here in the misty reaches of Castle Mount, just as thoroughly sequestered as the Pontifex was in his pit. At least the Coronal undertook the grand processional from time to time, and put himself back in touch with his subjects. Yet was that not precisely what Lord Valentine was doing now, and what help was that in healing the wound that widened in the heart of the world? Where was Valentine at this moment, anyway? What actions, if any, was he taking? Who in the government had heard so much as a word from him in months?

We are all wise and enlightened people, Hissune thought. And with the best will in the world we are doing everything wrong.

It was nearly time for the day’s meeting of the Council of Regency. He turned and made his way at a quick lope toward the interior of the Castle.

As he began the ascent of the Ninety-Nine Steps he caught sight of Alsimir, whom he had lately named as the chief among his aides, waving wildly and shouting from far above. Taking the steps two and three at a time, Hissune raced upward while Alsimir came plunging down just as swiftly.

“We’ve been looking all over for you!” Alsimir blurted breathlessly, when he was still half a dozen steps away. He seemed amazingly agitated.

“Well, you’ve found me,” Hissune snapped. “What’s going on?”

Pausing to collect himself, Alsimir said, “There’s been big excitement. A long message came in from Tunigorn an hour ago, in Gihorna—”

“Gihorna?” Hissune stared. “What in the name of the Divine is he doing there?”

“I couldn’t tell you that. All I know is that that’s where he sent the message from, and—”

“All right. All right.” Catching Alsimir by the arm, Hissune said sharply, “Tell me what he said!”

“Do you think I know? Would they let someone like me in on great matters of state?”

“A great matter of state, is it, then?”

“Divvis and Stasilaine have been in session in the council room for the last forty-five minutes, and they’ve sent messengers to all corners of the Castle trying to find you, and half the high lords of the Castle have gone to the meeting and the others are on their way, and—”

Valentine must be dead, Hissune thought, chilled.

“Come with me,” he said, and went sprinting furiously up the steps.

Outside the council chamber he found a madhouse scene, thirty or forty of the minor lords and princes and their aides milling about in confusion, and more arriving at every moment. As Hissune appeared they moved automatically aside for him, opening a path through which he moved like a sailing ship cutting its way imperiously through a sea thick with drifting dragon-grass. Leaving Alsimir by the door and instructing him to collect from the others whatever information they might have, he went in.

Stasilaine and Divvis sat at the high table: Divvis bleak-faced and grim, Stasilaine somber, pale, and uncharacteristically downcast, his shoulders slumped, his hand running nervously through his thick shock of hair. About them were most of the high lords: Mirigant, Elzandir, Manganot, Cantalis, the Duke of Halanx, Nimian of Dundilmir, and five or six others, including one that Hissune had seen only once before, the ancient and withered Prince Ghizmaile, grandson of the Pontifex Ossier who had preceded Tyeveras in the Labyrinth. All eyes turned upon Hissune as he entered, and he stood for a moment transfixed in the gaze of these men, the youngest of whom was ten or fifteen years his senior, and all of whom had spent their lives in the inner corridors of power. They were looking toward him as though he alone had the answer they required to some terrible and perplexing question.

“My lords,” said Hissune.

Divvis, scowling, pushed a long sheet of paper across the table toward him. “Read this,” he muttered. “Unless you already know.”

“I know only that there is a message from Tunigorn.”

“Read it, then.”

To Hissune’s annoyance there was a tremor in his hand as he reached for the paper. He glowered at his fingers as though they were in rebellion against him, and forced them to grow steady.

Clusters of words leaped from the paper at him.

—Valentine gone off to Piurifayne to beg the forgiveness of the Danipiur—

—a Metamorph spy discovered traveling in the Coronal’s own entourage—

—interrogation of the spy reveals that the Metamorphs themselves have created and spread the pestilences wracking the farmlands—

—a great sandstorm—Elidath dead, and many others—the Coronal has vanished into Piurifayne—

—Elidath dead—

—the Coronal has vanished—

—a spy in the Coronal’s entourage—

—the Metamorphs have created the pestilences themselves—

—the Coronal has vanished—

—Elidath dead—

—the Coronal has vanished—

—the Coronal has vanished—

—the Coronal has vanished—

Hissune looked up, appalled. “How certain is it that this message is authentic?”

“There can be no doubt,” said Stasilaine. “It came in over the secret transmission channels. The ciphers were the correct ones. The style of phrase is certainly Tunigorn’s, that I will warrant myself. Put your faith on it, Hissune: this is altogether genuine.”

“Then we have not one catastrophe to deal with, but three or four,” Hissune said.

“So it would appear,” said Divvis. “What are your thoughts on these matters, Hissune?”

Hissune gave the son of Lord Voriax a slow, careful look. There seemed to be no mockery in his question. It had appeared to Hissune that Divvis’s jealousy of him and contempt for him had abated somewhat during these months of their working together on the Council of Regency, that Divvis had at last come to have some respect for his capabilities; but yet this was the first time Divvis had gone this far, actually showing what looked like a sincere desire to know Hissune’s point of view—in front of the other high lords, even.

Carefully he said, “The first thing to recognize is that we are confronted not merely by a vast natural calamity, but by an insurrection. Tunigorn tells us that the Metamorph Y-Uulisaan has confessed, under interrogation by Deliamber and Tisana, that the responsibility for the plagues lies with the Metamorphs. I think we can have faith in Deliamber’s methods, and we all know that Tisana can see into souls, even Metamorph souls. So the situation is precisely as I heard Sleet express it to the Coronal, when they were at the Labyrinth at the beginning of the grand processional—and which I heard the Coronal refuse to accept: that the Shapeshifters are making war upon us.”

“And yet,” said Divvis, “Tunigorn also tells us that the Coronal has responded by shuffling into Piurifayne to convey his royal apologies to the Danipiur for all our unkindnesses to her subjects down through the ages. We are all very much aware that Valentine regards himself as a man of peace: his gentle treatment of those who overthrew him long ago showed us that. It is a noble trait. But I have argued here this afternoon, Hissune, that what Valentine has done now goes beyond pacifism into madness. I say the Coronal, if he is still alive at all, is insane. Thus we have a lunatic Pontifex and a lunatic Coronal, and this while a deadly enemy is at our throats. What are your views, Hissune?”

“That you misinterpret the facts as Tunigorn provides them.”

There was a flash of surprise and something like anger in Divvis’s eyes; but his voice was under taut control as he said, “Ah, do you think so?”

Hissune tapped the sheet of paper. “Tunigorn says that the Coronal has gone into Piurifayne, and that a spy has been caught and made to confess. Nowhere can I find him saying that Lord Valentine went to Piurifayne after hearing of the spy’s confession. I think it can be argued that the truth is quite the opposite: that Lord Valentine chose to undertake a mission of conciliation, the wisdom of which we clearly might wish to debate, but which is well within his character as we know it, and while he was away on that enterprise this other information came to light. Perhaps because of the storm, it became impossible for Tunigorn to communicate with the Coronal, although one would think Deliamber would be able to find some way.” Glancing toward the great world-sphere of Majipoor against the far wall, Hissune said, “What information do we have of the Coronal’s present location, anyway?”

“None,” Stasilaine murmured.

Hissune’s eyes widened.

The brilliant red light that indicated Lord Valentine’s movements had gone out.

“The light is dark,” said Hissune. “What does that mean? That he is dead?”

“It could mean that,” Stasilaine said. “Or merely that he has lost or damaged the transmitter that he carries on him to broadcast his position.”

Hissune nodded. “And there was a great storm, that caused many casualties. Although it’s unclear from the message, I can easily believe that Lord Valentine himself was caught in the storm on his way into Piurifayne, which presumably he entered from Gihorna, leaving Tunigorn and some others behind—”

“And either he perished in the storm or the transmitter was lost, we have no way of knowing which,” said Divvis.

“Let us hope the Divine has spared young Valentine’s life,” the aged Prince Ghizmaile declared suddenly in a voice so shriveled and sere it seemed barely to be that of a living creature. “But there is an issue we must deal with whether he is alive or dead, and that is the choice of a new Coronal.”

Hissune felt himself swept with amazement at the words this most senior of Castle lords had just uttered.

He looked about the room. “Do I hear right? Are we discussing the overthrow of a king today?”

“You put it too strongly,” Divvis answered smoothly. “All we discuss is whether it’s appropriate for Valentine to continue to serve as Coronal, in view of what we now know of the hostile intentions of the Shapeshifters and in view of what we have long known of Valentine’s methods of dealing with any sort of unpleasantness. If we are at war—and no one here any longer doubts that we are—then it’s reasonable to argue that Valentine is not the right man to lead us at this time, if in fact he still lives. But to replace him is not to overthrow him. There is a legitimate constitutional means of removing Valentine from the Confalume Throne without in any way embroiling Majipoor in conflict or manifesting a lack of love and respect for him.”

“You mean, by allowing the Pontifex Tyeveras to die.”

“Exactly. What say you to that, Hissune?”

Hissune did not at once reply. Like Divvis and Ghizmaile and, probably, most of the others here, he had been coming uneasily and reluctantly this afternoon to the conclusion that Lord Valentine must be replaced by someone more decisive, more aggressive, more belligerent, even. Nor was today the first time he had had those thoughts, though he had kept them to himself. And certainly there was an easy enough way of accomplishing a transfer of power, simply by bringing about Valentine’s elevation, willing or not, to the Pontificate.

But Hissune’s loyalty to Lord Valentine—his guide, his mentor, the architect of his career—was intense and deep-rooted. And he knew, perhaps better than any of these other men, the horror Valentine felt of being forced into the Labyrinth, which the Coronal saw not as an elevation but as a descent into the darkest depths. And to thrust that upon him behind his back, while he was in the midst of some valiant if misguided attempt to restore peace to the world without resorting to arms—why, it was cruelty, it was most monstrous cruelty indeed.

Yet reasons of state demanded it. Was there ever a time when reasons of state might countenance cruelty? Hissune knew what Lord Valentine would reply to such a question. But he was not wholly certain of his own answer.

He said after a time, “It may be so that Valentine is not the right Coronal for this time: I am of two minds on that score, and I would prefer to know more before I make an answer. I do tell you that I would not care to see him forcibly removed from office—has such a thing ever happened on Majipoor? I think not—but fortunately it would not be necessary to handle things that way, as we all recognize. However, I think we can leave the entire issue of Valentine’s adequacy in this time of crisis to discuss another time. What we should be examining, regardless of all these other matters, is the line of succession.”

There was a sudden tense stirring in the Council Room. Divvis’s eyes sought Hissune’s as though he were trying to penetrate the secrets of his soul. The Duke of Halanx reddened; the Prince of Banglecode sat stiffly upright; the Duke of Chorg leaned intently forward; only the two oldest men, Cantalis and Ghizmaile, remained still, as if the actual matter of choosing a particular person to be Coronal was beyond the concern of those who knew they had only a short while to live.

Hissune went on, “In this discussion we have chosen to ignore one gigantic aspect of Tunigorn’s message: that Elidath, who has so long been considered the heir to Lord Valentine, is dead.”

“Elidath did not want to be Coronal,” said Stasilaine in a voice almost too soft to be heard.

“That may be so,” Hissune replied. “Certainly he gave no sign of hungering for the throne once he had a taste of the regency. But my point is only that the tragic loss of Elidath removes the man to whom the crown would surely have been offered if Lord Valentine were no longer Coronal. With him gone we have no clear plan of succession; and we may learn tomorrow that Lord Valentine is dead, or that Tyeveras himself is finally dead, or that events require us to engineer the removal of Valentine from his present office. We should be prepared for any of those eventualities. We are the ones who will choose the next Coronal: do we know who that will be?”

“Are you asking us to vote on an order of succession right now?” Prince Manganot of Banglecode demanded.

“It seems clear enough already,” said Mirigant. “The Coronal appointed a Regent when he went off on the grand processional, and the Regent appointed three more—I assume with Lord Valentine’s approval—when he too left the Castle. Those three have governed us for some months. If we must find a new Coronal, shall we not find it among those three?”

Stasilaine said, “You frighten me, Mirigant. Once I thought it would be a grand thing to be Coronal, as I suppose most of you also thought, when you were boys. I am a boy no longer, and I saw how Elidath changed, and not for the better, when the full weight of power descended upon him. Let me be the first to fall down in homage before the new Coronal. But let him be someone other than Stasilaine!”

“The Coronal,” said the Duke of Chorg, “should never be a man who hungers too deeply for the crown. But I think he ought not to be one who dreads it, either.”

“I thank you, Elzandir,” said Stasilaine. “I am not a candidate, is it understood?”

“Divvis? Hissune?” Mirigant said.

Hissune felt a muscle leaping about in one of his cheeks, and a strange numbness in his arms and shoulders. He looked toward Divvis. The older man smiled and shrugged, and said nothing. There was a roaring in Hissune’s ears, a throbbing at his temples. Should he speak? What was he to say? Now that it had come down to it at last, could he stand before these princes and blithely announce that he was willing to be Coronal? He felt that Divvis was engaged in some maneuver far beyond his comprehension; and for the first time since he had entered the Council Chamber this afternoon he had no idea of the direction to follow.

The silence seemed unending.

Then he heard his own voice—calm, even, measured—saying, “I think we need not carry the proceedings beyond this point. Two candidates have emerged: consideration of their qualifications seems now in order. Not here. Not today. For the moment we have done enough. What do you say, Divvis?”

“You speak wisely and with deep understanding, Hissune. As always.”

“Then I call for adjournment,” said Mirigant, “while we consider these matters and wait for the arrival of further news of the Coronal.”

Hissune held up a hand. “One other thing, first.”

He waited for their attention.

Then he said, “I have for some time wished to travel to the Labyrinth, to visit my family, to see certain friends. I believe also it would be useful for one of us to confer with the officials of the Pontifex, and get first-hand knowledge of the state of Tyeveras’s health; for it may be that we will have to choose a Pontifex and a Coronal both, in the months just ahead, and we should be ready for such a unique event if it comes upon us. So I propose the designation of an official embassy from Castle Mount to the Labyrinth, and I offer myself as the ambassador.”

“Seconded,” said Divvis at once.

There was a business of discussing and voting, and once that was done there was a vote for adjournment, and then the meeting dissolved into a swirl of smaller groups. Hissune stood by himself, wondering when he would awaken from all this. He became aware after a moment of tall fair-haired Stasilaine looming over him, frowning and smiling both at the same time.

Quietly Stasilaine said, “Perhaps it is a mistake to leave the Castle at such a time, Hissune.”

“Perhaps. It seemed the right thing for me to do, though. I’ll risk it.”

“Then proclaim yourself Coronal before you go!”

“Are you serious, Stasilaine? What if Valentine still lives?”

“If he lives, you know how to arrange for his becoming Pontifex. If he is dead, Hissune, you must seize his place while you can.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“You must! Otherwise you may find Divvis on the throne when you return!”

Hissune grinned. “Easily enough dealt with. If Valentine is dead and Divvis has replaced him, I will see to it that Tyeveras at last is allowed to rest. Divvis immediately becomes Pontifex and must go to the Labyrinth, and still another new Coronal is required, with only one candidate available.”

“By the Lady, you are astonishing!”

“Am I? It seems an obvious enough move to me.” Hissune took the older man’s hand firmly in his. “I thank you for your support, Stasilaine. And I tell you that all will be well, at the end. If I must be Coronal to Divvis’s Pontifex, so be it: we can work together, he and I, I do think. But for now let us pray for Lord Valentine’s safety and success, and leave off all these speculations. Yes?”

“By all means,” said Stasilaine.

They embraced briefly, and Hissune went from the council chamber. In the hallway outside, all was in the same confusion as before, though now perhaps a hundred or more of the lesser lords were gathered, and the looks that he received from them when he appeared were extraordinary. But Hissune said nothing to any of them, nor did he as much as let his eyes meet any of theirs as he moved through the throng. He found Alsimir at the edge of the crowd, gaping at him in a preposterous slack-jawed wide-eyed way. Hissune beckoned to him and told him to make ready for a journey to the Labyrinth.

The young knight looked at Hissune in total awe and said, “I should tell you, my lord, that a tale came through this crowd some minutes ago that you are to be made Coronal. Will you tell me if there is truth to that?”

“Lord Valentine is our Coronal,” said Hissune brusquely.

“Now go and prepare yourself for departure. I mean to set out for the Labyrinth at dawn.”

6

When she was still a dozen blocks from home, Millilain began to hear the rhythmic shouting in the streets ahead of her: “Yah -tah, yah -tah, yah-tah, voom,” or something like that, nonsensical sounds, gibberish, pounded out at full-throated volume again and again and again by what sounded like a thousand madmen. She came to a halt and pressed herself fearfully against an old crumbling stone wall, feeling trapped. Behind her, in the square, a bunch of drunken March-men were roistering about, smashing windows and molesting passersby. Somewhere off to the east the Knights of Dekkeret were holding a rally in honor of Lord Sempeturn. And now this new craziness. Yah-tah, yah-tah, yah-tah, voom. There was no place to turn. There was no place to hide. All she wanted to do was to reach her house safely and bolt the door. The world had gone crazy. Yah-tah, yah-tah, yah-tah, voom.

It was like a sending of the King of Dreams, except that it went on hour after hour, day after day, month after month. Even the worst of sendings, though it might leave you shaken to the roots of your soul, lasted only a short while. But this never ended. And it grew worse and worse.

Riots and lootings all the time. No food but scraps and crusts, or occasionally a bit of meat that you might be able to buy from the March-men. They came down out of their mountains with animals they had killed, and sold you the meat for a ruinous price, if you had anything left to pay for it with, and then they drank up their profits and ran amok in the streets before they went home. And new troubles constantly springing up. The sea dragons, so it was said, were sinking any vessel that ventured out to sea, and commerce between the continents was virtually at an end. Lord Valentine was rumored to be dead. And not one new Coronal in Khyntor now but two, Sempeturn and that Hjort who called himself Lord Stiamot. And each with his own little army to march up and down shouting slogans and making trouble: Sempeturn with the Knights of Dekkeret, the other one with the Order of the Triple Sword, or some such name. Kristofon was a Knight of Dekkeret now. She hadn’t seen him in two weeks. Another Coronal in Ni-moya, and a couple of Pontifexes roaming around also. Now this. Yah-tah yah -tah yah-tah voom.

Whatever that was, she didn’t want to get any closer to it. Most likely it was one more new Coronal with one more mob of hysterical followers. Millilain looked about warily, wondering if she dared go down Dizimaule Street and cut through the back alleyway to Malamola Road, which would run into her street a few blocks below the Voriax Causeway. The problem was that alleyway—she had heard some strange stories about what had been going on in there lately—

Night was coming on. A light rain, little more than a heavy mist, began to fall. She felt lightheaded and dizzy from hunger, though she was becoming accustomed to that. Out of the south, from the suburb of Hot Khyntor where all the geothermal formations were, came the sullen booming of Confalume Geyser, punctual as ever, marking the hour. Automatically Millilain looked toward it and saw its great column of steam rising heavenward, with a broad sulphurous mantle of yellow smoke surrounding it and seeming to fill half the sky. She had been looking at the geysers of Hot Khyntor all her life, taking them completely for granted, but somehow tonight the eruption frightened her as never before, and she made the sign of the Lady again and again until it began to subside.

The Lady. Did she still watch over Majipoor? What had become of her kindly sendings that gave such good counsel and warm comfort? For that matter, where was the King of Dreams? Once, in quieter times, those two Powers had kept everyone’s life in balance, advising, admonishing, if necessary punishing. Perhaps they still reigned, Millilain thought: but the situation was so far out of hand that neither King nor Lady could possibly cope with it, though they might labor from dawn to dawn to bring matters back under control. It was a system designed to work beautifully in a world where most people gladly obeyed the law anyway. But now hardly anyone obeyed the law. There was no law.

Yah-tah yah -tah yah-tah voom.

And from the other side:

“Sempeturn! Lord Sempeturn! Hail, hail, hail, Lord Sempeturn!”

The rain was coming down harder, now. Get moving, she told herself. March-men in the square, and the Divine only knows what madness ahead of you, and the Knights of Dekkeret cavorting behind you—trouble, any way at all. And even if Kristofon was among the Knights, she didn’t want to see him, eyes glassy with devotion, hands upraised in the new form of the starburst salute. She began to run. Across Malibor to Dizimaule, down Dizimaule toward that little alleyway connecting with Malamola—did she dare?

Yah-tah yah -tah yah-tah voom.

A line of paraders coming up Dizimaule Street toward her, suddenly! Walking like some sort of soulless machines, nine or ten abreast, arms swinging stiffly up and down, right left right left, and that chant bursting from them in an endless insistent jabbing rhythm. They would parade right over her and never see her. She made a quick turn into the alleyway, only to find a horde of men and women with green-and-gold armbands clogging the far end and screaming in praise of the new Lord Stiamot.

Trapped! All the lunatics were out at once tonight!

Desperately glancing about, Millilain saw a door half ajar on the left-hand side of the alleyway and ducked quickly into it. She found herself in a dark corridor, with faint chanting and the sharp scent of a strange incense coming from a room at the far end of it. A shrine of some sort. One of the new cults, maybe. But at least they were unlikely to hurt her, here. She might be able to stay until all the various demented mobs outside had moved along to another part of town.

Cautiously she moved down the corridor and peered into the room at the end. Dark. Fragrant. A dais at one side and what looked like two small dried sea dragons mounted like flagpoles at either end of it. A Liiman standing between them, somber, silent, triple eyes burning like smouldering coals. Millilain thought she recognized him: the street vendor who once had sold her a skewer of sausages for five crowns. But maybe not. It was hard to tell one Liiman from the next, after all.

A hooded figure who smelled like a Ghayrog came up to her and whispered, “You are in time for communion, sister. Welcome and the peace of the water-kings be upon you.”

The water-kings?

The Ghayrog took her gently by the elbow and just as gently propelled her into the room, so that she could take her place among the kneeling, murmuring congregation. No one looked at her; no one was looking at anyone else; all eyes were on the Liiman between the two little dried sea dragons. Millilain looked toward him too. She dared not glance about at those alongside her, for fear she might find friends of hers here.

“Take—drink—join—” the Liiman commanded.

They were passing wine-bowls from aisle to aisle. Out of the corner of her eye Millilain saw that each worshiper, when the bowl came to him, put it to his lips and drank deeply, so that the bowls had constantly to be refilled as they moved through the room. The closest one was four or five rows ahead of her just then.

The Liiman said, “We drink. We join. We go forth and embrace the water-king.”

Water-kings were what the Liimen called the sea dragons. Millilain remembered. They worshipped the dragons, so it was reported. Well, she thought, maybe there’s something to it. Everything else has failed: give the world to the sea dragons. The wine-bowl, she saw, was two rows ahead of her now, but moving slowly.

“We went among the water-kings and hunted them and took them from the sea,” said the Liiman. “We ate their flesh and drank their milk. And this was their gift to us and their great willing sacrifice, for they are gods and it is right and proper for gods to give their flesh and their milk to lesser folk, to nurture them and make them like gods themselves. And now the time of the water-kings is coming. Take. Drink. Join.”

The bowl was passing down Millilain’s row.

“They are the great ones of the world,” the Liiman intoned. “They are the masters. They are the monarchs. They are the true Powers, and we belong to them. We and all others who live on Majipoor. Take. Drink. Join.”

The woman at Millilain’s left was drinking from the wine-bowl now. A savage impatience came over her—she was so hungry, she was so thirsty!—and she was barely able to restrain herself from pulling the bowl from the woman’s grasp, fearing none would be left for her. But she waited; and then the bowl was in her hands. She stared down into it: a dark wine, thick, glossy. It looked strange. Hesitantly she took a sip. It was sweet and spicy, and heavy on her tongue, and at first she thought it was like no wine she had ever tasted, but then it seemed that there was something familiar about it. She took another sip.

“Take. Drink. Join.”

Why, it was the wine dream-speakers used, when they made their communion with your mind and spoke the dream that was troubling you! That was it, surely, dream-wine. Though Millilain had been to a dream-speaker only five or six times, and not for years, she recognized the unmistakable flavor of the stuff. But how could that be? Only dream-speakers were allowed to use it, or even to possess it. It was a powerful drug. It was to be used only under a speaker’s supervision. But somehow in this backroom chapel they had vats and vats of it, and the congregation was guzzling it as though it were beer—

“Take. Drink. Join.”

She realized she was holding up the passing of the bowl. She turned to the man on her right with a silly grin and an apology, but he was staring rigidly forward and paid no heed to her; so with a shrug she put the bowl to her lips and took a deep reckless gulp, and then another, and handed the bowl onward.

Almost at once she felt the effect. She swayed, blinked, had to struggle to keep her head from falling forward against her knees. It’s because I drank it on an empty stomach, she told herself. She crouched down, leaned forward, began to chant along with the congregation, a low wordless meaningless repetitious murmur, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah, just as absurd as what those others had been shouting in the street, but somehow gentler, a tender crooning yearning cry, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah. And as she chanted it seemed to her that she heard a distant music, weird, otherworldly, the sound of many bells far away, ringing in patterns of overlapping changes that were impossible to follow for long, since one strand of melody quickly became lost inside its successor, and that one in the next. Oo wah vah mah, she sang, and back to her came the song of the bells, and then she had a sense of something immense very close by, perhaps even in this very room, something colossal and winged and ancient and enormously intelligent, something whose intellect was as far beyond her comprehension as hers would be beyond a bird’s. It was turning and turning and turning in vast unhurried orbits, and each time it turned it unfolded its giant wings and spread them to the ends of the world, and when it folded them again they brushed against the gates of Millilain’s mind—just a tickle, just the lightest of touches, a feather-whisk, and yet she felt herself transformed by it, lifted out of herself, made part of some organism of many minds, unimaginable, godlike. Take. Drink. Join. With each touch of those wings she joined more profoundly. Oh wah vah mah. Oo wah vah mah. She was lost. There was no more Millilain. There was only the water-king whose sound was the sound of bells, and the many-minded mind of which the former Millilain had become a part. Oo. Wah. Vah. Mah.

It frightened her. She was being drugged down to the bottom of the sea, and her lungs were filling with water, and the pain was terrible. She fought. She would not let the great wings touch her. She pulled back, and pounded with her fists, and forced her way upward, up toward the surface—

Opened her eyes. Sat up, dazed, terrified. All about her the chanting was going on. Oo, wah, vah, mah. Millilain shuddered. Where am I? What have I done? I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. In panic she struggled to her feet and went blundering down the row to the aisle. No one stopped her. The wine still muzzed her mind and she found herself lurching, staggering, clutching at the walls. She was out of the room, now. Stumbling down that long dark fragrant corridor. The wings were still beating about her, enfolding her, reaching toward her mind. What have I done, what have I done?

Out into the alleyway, the darkness, the rain. Were they still marching around out here, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Order of the Triple Sword and whoever those others were? She did not care. Let whatever come that may. She began to run, not knowing which way she ran. There was a dull heavy booming sound far away that she hoped was the Confalume Geyser. Other sounds pounded in her mind. Yah-tah yah-tah yah -tah voom. Oo, wah, vah, mah. She felt the wings closing about her. She ran, and tripped and fell, and rose and went on running.

7

The deeper they journeyed into the Shapeshifter province, the more familiar everything began to look to Valentine. And yet at the same time the conviction had come to grow in him that he was making some ghastly and terrible mistake.

He remembered the scent of the place: rich, musky, complex, the sweet heavy aroma of growth and decay going forward with equal intensities under the constant warm rainfall, an intricate mix of flavors that flooded the nostrils to dizzying effect at every intake of breath. He remembered the close, clinging, moist air, and the showers that fell almost hourly, pattering against the forest roof high overhead and trickling down from leaf to shiny leaf until just a little reached the ground. He remembered the fantastic profusion of plant life, everything sprouting and uncoiling almost while one watched, and yet somehow oddly disciplined, everything fitting into well-defined layers—the towering slender trees bare of branches for seven eighths of their height, then flaring out into great umbrellas of leaves tied together into a tight canopy by a tangle of vines and creepers and epiphytes, and under that a level of shorter, rounder, fuller, more shade-tolerant trees, and a stratum of clumping shrubbery below that, and then the forest floor, dark, mysterious, all but barren, a stark expanse of damp thin spongy soil that bounced jauntily underfoot. He remembered the sudden shafts of light, deep-hued and alien, that came spearing at unpredictable intervals through the canopy to provide quick startling moments of clarity in the dimness.

But the Piurifayne rain-forest spread over thousands of square miles of the heart of Zimroel, and one part of it very likely looked much like any other part. Somewhere in here was the Shapeshifter capital, Ilirivoyne: but what reason do I have, Valentine asked himself, to think that I am near it, merely because the smells and sounds and textures of this jungle are similar to the smells and sounds and textures I recall from years ago?

That other time—traveling with the wandering jugglers, when they had taken the mad notion that they might earn a few royals by going to perform at the Metamorphs’ harvest festival—there had at least been Deliamber to cast a few Vroonish spells to sniff out the right fork in the road, and the valiant Lisamon Hultin, also wise in the ways of jungle lore. But on this second venture into Piurifayne Valentine was entirely on his own.

Deliamber and Lisamon, if they were still alive at all—and he was gloomy on that score, for in all these weeks he had had no contact with them even in dreams—were somewhere hundreds of miles behind him, on the far side of the Steiche. Nor had he had any sort of report from Tunigorn, whom he had sent back to look for them. He rode now only with Carabella and Sleet and a bodyguard of Skandars. Carabella had courage and endurance but little skill as a pathfinder, and the Skandars were strong and brave but not very bright, and Sleet, for all his shrewd, sober-minded ways, was in this region hampered greatly by the paralyzing dread of Shapeshifters that had been laid upon him in a dream while he was young, and which he had never fully been able to throw off. It was folly for a Coronal to be roaming the jungles of Piurifayne with so skimpy an entourage: but folly seemed to have become the hallmark of recent Coronals, Valentine thought, considering that his two predecessors, Malibor and Voriax, had met early and violent deaths while off doing foolish things. Perhaps it has become the custom, this rashness of kings.

And it seemed to him that from day to day he was neither getting closer to Ilirivoyne nor farther from it; that it was everywhere and nowhere, in these jungles; that perhaps the whole city had picked itself up and was moving onward just ahead of him, maintaining a constant distance from him, a gap he could never close. For the Shapeshifter capital, as he recalled it from that other time, was a place of flimsy wicker-work buildings, and only a few more substantial ones, and it had seemed to him then a makeshift phantom city that might well flit from one site to another at the whim of its inhabitants: a nomad-city, a dream city, a jungle will-o’-the-wisp.

“Look, there,” Carabella said. “Is that a trail, Valentine?”

“Perhaps it is,” he said.

“And perhaps not?”

“Perhaps not, yes.”

They had seen hundreds of trails much like it: faint scars on the jungle floor, the unreadable imprints of some former presence, imprints made last month, possibly, or possibly in the time of Lord Dekkeret a thousand years before. An occasional stick planted in the ground, with a bit of feather fastened to it, maybe, or a scrap of ribbon; a row of grooves, as of something having been dragged this way once; or sometimes nothing in any way visible, just a psychic spoor, the mystifying vestigial trace of the passage of intelligent beings. But none of these things ever led them anywhere. Sooner or later the clues dwindled and became imperceptible and only virgin jungle lay ahead.

“Shall we make camp, my lord?” Sleet said.

Neither he nor Carabella had spoken a word yet against this expedition, foolhardy though it must seem to them. Did they understand, Valentine wondered, how urgently he felt the need to consummate his meeting with the Shapeshifter queen? Or was it out of fear of the wrath of king and husband that they kept this obliging silence through these weeks of aimless roaming, when surely they must think his time was better spent in the civilized provinces, coping with whatever awful crisis must be unfolding there? Or were they—worst of all—merely humoring him as he spun his mad way through these dense rain-swept glades? He dared not ask. He wondered only how long he would pursue the quest, despite his gathering conviction that he was never to find Ilirivoyne.

When they were settled for the night he donned the Lady’s silver circlet and thrust himself once again into the trance state, the mind-casting state, and sent his spirit outward across the jungle, seeking Deliamber, seeking Tisana.

He thought it likely that he could reach their minds more easily than any of the others, sensitive as those two were to the witcheries of dreams. But he had tried, night after night, without ever once feeling a flicker of contact. Was distance the problem? Valentine had never attempted long-range mindcasting except with the aid of dream-wine, and he had none of that there. Or perhaps the Metamorphs had some way of intercepting or disrupting his transmissions. Or perhaps his messages were not getting through because those he was sending them to were dead. Or—

—Tisana—Tisana —

—Deliamber—

—This is Valentine calling you —Valentine —Valentine—Valentine—

—Tisana —

—Deliamber —

Nothing.

He tried reaching Tunigorn. Surely Tunigorn still lived, no matter what calamity had overtaken the others; and though his mind was stolid and well defended, nevertheless there was always the hope it might open to one of Valentine’s probes. Or Lisamon’s. Or Zalzan Kavol’s. To touch any of them, to feel the familiar response of a familiar mind—

He went on for a time; and then, sadly, he removed the circlet and restored it to its case. Carabella gave him an inquiring glance. Valentine shook his head and shrugged. “It’s very quiet out there,” he said.

“Except for the rain.”

“Yes. Except for the rain.”

The rain was drumming delicately against the lofty forest canopy once more. Valentine peered gloomily into the jungle, but he saw nothing: the floater’s beam was on, and would stay on all night, but beyond the golden sphere of light that that created lay only a wall of blackness. A thousand Metamorphs might be gathered in a ring around the camp, for all he knew. He wished it were so. Anything—even a surprise attack—would be preferable to these foolish weeks of wandering in an unknown and unknowable wilderness.

How long, he asked himself, am I going to keep this up?

And how are we ever going to find our way out of here, once I decide that this quest is absurd?

He listened somberly to the changing rhythms of the rain until he drifted finally into sleep.

Almost at once, he felt the onset of a dream.

By its intensity and by a certain vividness and warmth he knew it to be no ordinary dream but rather a sending of the Lady, the first he had had since leaving the coast of Gihorna; and yet as he waited for some tangible sign of the presence of his mother in his mind he grew perplexed, for she had not announced herself, and indeed the impulses penetrating his soul seemed to come from another source entirely. The King of Dreams? He too had the power to enter minds from afar, of course; but not even in such strange times as these would the King of Dreams presume to aim his instrument at the Coronal. Who, then? Valentine, watchful even in sleep, scanned the boundaries of his dream, seeking and not finding an answer.

The dream was almost entirely without narrative structure: it was a thing of shapeless forms and silent sounds, creating a sense of event by purely abstract means. But gradually the dream presented him with a cluster of moving images and slippery shifts of mood that became a metaphor for something quite concrete: the writhing, interlacing tentacles of a Vroon.

—Deliamber?

—I am here, my lord.

—Where?

—Here. Close by you. Moving toward you.

That much was communicated not in any kind of speech, mental or otherwise, but entirely through a grammar of shifting patterns of light and mind-state that carried unambiguous meaning. After a while the dream left him, and he lay still, neither awake nor asleep, reflecting on what had come to him; and for the first time in weeks he felt some sense of hope.

In the morning as Sleet was preparing to strike camp Valentine said, “No. I plan to remain here another few days. Or possibly even longer.”

A look of doubt and confusion, instantly suppressed but briefly evident, passed across Sleet’s face. But he merely nodded and went off to tell the Skandars to leave the tents as they were.

Carabella said, “This night has brought you news, my lord. I see that in your face.”

“Deliamber lives. He and the others have been following us, trying to rejoin us. But we’ve been drifting about so much, traveling so quickly—they can’t catch up with us. As soon as they have a fix on us, we head off in some new direction. If we remain in one place they’ll be able to find us.”

“You spoke with the Vroon, then?”

“With his image, with his shadow. But it was the true shadow, the authentic image. He’ll be with us soon.”

And indeed Valentine had no doubt of that. But a day passed, and another, and another. Each night he donned his circlet and sent forth a signal, and had no response. The Skandar guards took to prowling the jungle like restless beasts; Sleet grew tense and fidgety, and went off alone for hours at a time, despite the fear of Metamorphs he claimed to feel. Carabella, seeing matters growing so edgy, suggested that he and she and Valentine do a little juggling, for the sake of old times and to give themselves an amusement so demanding it would draw their minds away from other concerns; but Sleet said he had no heart for it and Valentine, when he agreed at her urging to try it, was so fumble-fingered from lack of practice that he would have abandoned the attempt in the first five minutes, but for Carabella’s insistence. “Of course you’re rusty!” she said. “Do you think the skill stays sharp without some honing? But it comes back, if you work at it. Here, Valentine: catch! Catch! Catch!”

Indeed she was right. A little effort, and he began to feel once more the old sense that the union of hand and eye could carry him to a place where time had no meaning and all of space became a single infinite point. The Skandars, though they must surely have known that juggling had once been Valentine’s profession, were plainly astounded at seeing a Coronal do any such thing, and gaped in undisguised curiosity and awe as Valentine and Carabella tossed a motley galaxy of objects back and forth to one another.

“Hoy!” she cried, and “Hoy!” and “Hoy!” as she led him on to ever more complex feats. They were nothing compared with the tricks she had routinely performed in the old days, for her skill had been great indeed, and they were trivial even in comparison with the level of technique that Valentine, never Carabella’s equal as a juggler, once had mastered. But it was fair going, he thought, for someone who had not juggled seriously in close to a decade. Within an hour, rain soaked and sweat soaked though he was, he felt better than he had in months.

Sleet appeared and, watching them, seemed to draw out of his anxiety and gloom; after a while he moved closer, and Carabella tossed a knife and a club and a hatchet to him, and he caught them casually and began to weave them into a lofty playful cascade to which he added three more things that Valentine sent his way. There was perhaps a shade of strain visible on Sleet’s face that would not have been there a decade ago—except when he was doing his famous routine of juggling blindfolded, maybe—but in no other way did he betray any lessening of his great skill. “Hoy!” he cried, sending the club and the hatchet back toward Valentine, and remorselessly sending other things Valentine’s way before the Coronal had caught the first. Then he and Valentine and Carabella went at it with very great seriousness indeed, as though they were wandering jugglers once more, and were rehearsing for a performance before the royal court.

Sleet’s display of virtuosity inspired Carabella to some intricate feats of her own, which led Sleet to call for some even more difficult maneuvers, and before long Valentine was totally out of his depth. All the same he attempted to keep up with them as long as he could, and did a creditable job at it, only dropping an occasional thing—until he found himself bombarded from both sides at once by a laughing Carabella and a cool, intense Sleet: and he found himself suddenly all elbows and no fingers, and allowed everything to go tumbling from his grasp.

“Ah, my lord, that’s no way to do it!” boomed a harsh and wonderfully familiar voice.”

“Zalzan Kavol?” Valentine cried in amazement and glee.

The huge Skandar came bounding toward him, quickly making the starburst salute and then scooping up all the things that Valentine had dropped; and with a manic delight he began to toss them at Sleet and Carabella in that wild four-armed way of his that could push any human juggler, no matter how skilled, to the limits of his ability.

Valentine looked deeper into the jungle and saw the others running through the rain: Lisamon Hultin, with the Vroon perched on her shoulder, Tunigorn, Tisana, Ermanar, Shanamir, and still more, erupting one after another from a battered and mud-splattered floater parked not far away. All of them had come, Valentine realized—everyone whom he had left behind in Gihorna, the entire party reunited at last. “Get out the wine!” he cried. “This calls for celebration!” He rushed among them, embracing this one and that, straining upward to throw his arms about the giantess, pummeling Shanamir joyfully, clasping hands solemnly with the dignified Ermanar, seizing Tunigorn in a hug that might have throttled a weaker man.

“My lord,” shouted Lisamon, “you will never go off by yourself again, so long as I live! With all respects, my lord. Never again! Never!”

“If I had known, my lord,” said Zalzan Kavol, “that when you said you would travel a day’s journey ahead of us to the Steiche, that there was going to be a storm of such force, and that we would not see you again for this many weeks—ah, my lord, what kind of guardians do you think we are, to let you escape from us this way? When Tunigorn said you had survived the storm, but had gone chasing off into Piurifayne without waiting for us—ah, my lord, my lord, if you were not my lord I would have wanted to commit treason upon you when I caught up with you again, believe me, my lord!”

“And will you forgive me this escapade?” Valentine asked.

“My lord, my lord!”

“You know it was never my intention to separate myself from you this long. That was why I sent Tunigorn back, to find you and have you come after me. And each night I sent messages to you—I put the circlet on, I strived with all my mind’s strength to reach out and touch you—you, Deliamber, and you, Tisana—”

“Those messages reached us, my lord,” said Deliamber.

“They did?”

“Night after night. It gave us much joy, knowing that you were alive.”

“And you made no reply?” Valentine asked.

“Ah, my lord, we replied every time,” the Vroon said. “But we knew we were not getting through, that my power was not strong enough over such a distance. We longed to tell you to stay where you were, and let us come to you; but every day you were farther into the jungle, and there was no holding you back, and we were unable to overtake you, and I could not reach your mind, my lord. I could not reach your mind.”

“But finally you did get through.”

“With the help of your mother the Lady,” said Deliamber. “Tisana went to her in sleep, and won from her a sending, and the Lady understood; and she made of her own mind the courier for mine, carrying me where I could not go myself. And that was how we spoke to you at last. My lord, there is so much to tell you, now!”

“Indeed,” said Tunigorn. “You’ll be astonished, Valentine. I pledge you that.”

“Astonish me, then,” Valentine said.

Deliamber said, “Tunigorn has told you, I think, that we discovered the agricultural expert Y-Uulisaan to be a Shapeshifter spy?”

“So he has told me, yes. But how was this discovered?”

“The day you set out for the Steiche, my lord, we came upon Y-Uulisaan deep in the communion of minds with some far-off person. I felt his mind reaching forth; I felt the force of the communion. And immediately I asked Zalzan Kavol and Lisamon to apprehend him.”

Valentine blinked. “How could Y-Uulisaan possibly have had such a power?”

“Because he was a Shapeshifter, my lord,” said Tisana, “and the Shapeshifters have a way of linking mind to mind using the great sea-dragon kings as their joining-place.”

Like a man who has been attacked from two sides at once, Valentine glanced from Tisana to Deliamber, and back at the old dream-speaker again. He struggled to absorb the meaning of the things they had said, but there was so much in them that was strange, that was entirely bewildering, that he could at first grasp very little. “It baffles me,” he said, “to hear of Metamorphs speaking to one another through sea dragons. Who could have supposed the dragons had any such power of mind?”

“Water-kings, my lord, is what they call them,” Tisana said. “And it appears that the water-kings have very powerful minds indeed. Which enabled the spy to file his reports with great ease.”

“Reports on what?” said Valentine uneasily. “And to whom?”

“When we found Y-Uulisaan in this communion,” said Deliamber, “Lisamon and Zalzan Kavol seized him, and he at once began to change his shape. We would have brought him to you for interrogation, but you had gone ahead to the river, and then the storm began and we could not follow. So we interrogated him ourselves. He admitted that he was a spy, my lord, who would help you to formulate the government’s response to the plagues and blights, and then immediately send word of what that response would be. Which was of great aid to the Metamorphs as they went about the business of causing and spreading those plagues.”

Valentine gasped. “The Metamorphs—causing the plagues—spreading the plagues—?”

“Yes, my lord. Y-Uulisaan told us all. We were—ah—not gentle with him. In secret laboratories here in Piurifayne the Metamorphs have for years developed cultures of every enemy of our crops that has ever afflicted them. And when they were ready, they went forth in a thousand disguises—some of them, my lord, actually went to farmers masquerading as provincial agricultural agents, pretending to offer new ways of increasing farm yield, and secretly scattered their poisons over the fields while inspecting them. And also certain creatures were let loose by air, carried by birds that the Metamorphs released. Or things were sprayed, and became drifting clouds—”

Stunned, Valentine looked toward Sleet and said, “Then we have been at war, and did not know it!”

“We know it now, my lord,” said Tunigorn.

“And I have been traveling through the kingdom of my enemy, thinking in my foolishness that all I needed to do was speak soft words, and open my arms in love, and the Danipiur would smile and the Divine would bless us once again. But in truth the Danipiur and her people have been waging a terrible war against us all the while, and—”

“No, my lord,” Deliamber said. “Not the Danipiur. Not so far as we know.”

“What do you say?”

“The one whom Y-Uulisaan served is named Faraataa, a being consumed with hate, a wild man, who could not get the Danipiur to give her backing to his program, and therefore went off with his followers to launch it himself. There are two factions among the Metamorphs, do you see, my lord? This Faraataa leads the radical ones, the war-hungry ones. It is their plan to starve us into chaos and compel us to leave Majipoor. Whereas the Danipiur appears to be more moderate, or at least less fierce.”

“Then I must continue toward Ilirivoyne and speak with her.”

“You will never find Ilirivoyne, my lord,” said Deliamber.

“And why is that?”

“They have taken the city apart, and they carry it on their backs through the jungle. I feel its presence when I cast my spells—but it is a presence that moves. The Danipiur flees you, my lord. She does not want to meet with you. Perhaps it is too dangerous politically—perhaps she is unable to control her own people any longer, and fears they will all go over to the faction of Faraataa if she shows any favor toward you. I am only guessing, my lord. But I tell you, you will never find her, even if you search in this jungle a thousand years.”

Valentine nodded. “Probably you are right, Deliamber. Certainly you are right.” He closed his eyes and sought desperately to quell the turmoil in his mind. How badly he had misjudged things; how little he had understood! “This communication between Metamorphs through the minds of sea dragons—how long has that been going on?”

“Perhaps quite some time, my lord. The sea dragons appear to be more intelligent than we have thought—and there seems to be some kind of alliance between them and the Metamorphs, or at least with some Metamorphs. It is very unclear.”

“And Y-Uulisaan? Where is he? We should question him further on these things.”

“Dead, my lord,” said Lisamon Hultin.

“How is that?”

“When the storm struck, all was confusion, and he attempted to escape. We recaptured him for a moment, but then the wind tore him from my grasp and it was impossible to find him again. We discovered his body the next day.”

“A small loss, my lord,” Deliamber said. “We could have extracted little else from him.”

“I would have liked the chance to speak with him, all the same,” Valentine replied. “Well, it will not happen. Nor will I speak with the Danipiur either, I suppose. But it is hard for me to abandon that idea. Is there utterly no hope of finding Ilirivoyne, Deliamber?”

“None, I think, my lord.”

“I see her as an ally: does that sound strange to you? The Metamorph queen and the Coronal, joined in league against those who wage biological warfare against us. Folly, eh, Tunigorn? Come, speak openly: you think it’s folly.”

Tunigorn shrugged. “On that score I can say very little, Valentine. I know only that I believe Deliamber is right: the Danipiur wants no meeting with you, and will not allow herself to be found. And I think that to spend further time in quest of her now—”

“Would be foolish. Yes. Folly indeed, while there’s so much for me to do elsewhere.”

Valentine fell silent. Absentmindedly he took a couple of the juggling implements from Zalzan Kavol and began to toss them from hand to hand. Plagues, famines, false Coronals, he thought. Madness. Chaos. Biological warfare. The anger of the Divine made manifest. And the Coronal trekking endlessly through the Metamorph jungle on a fool’s mission? No. No.

To Deliamber he said, “Do you have any idea where we are now?”

“As best I can calculate, some nineteen hundred miles southwest of Piliplok, my lord.”

“How long, then, do you think it would take us to get there?”

Tunigorn said, “I wouldn’t go to Piliplok at all just now, Valentine.”

Frowning, Valentine said, “Why so?”

“The danger.”

“Danger? For a Coronal? I was there just a month or two ago, Tunigorn, and I saw no danger!”

“Things have changed. Piliplok has proclaimed itself a free republic, so the word reaches us. The citizens of Piliplok, still having ample food supplies in storage, were fearful of having those supplies requisitioned for use in Khyntor and Ni-moya; and so Piliplok has seceded from the commonwealth.”

Valentine stared as though into an infinite abyss. “Seceded? A free republic? These words have no meaning!”

“Nevertheless, they seem to have meaning for the citizens of Piliplok. We have no idea what sort of reception they would give you these days. I think it might be wise to go elsewhere until the situation becomes clearer,” Tunigorn said.

Angrily Valentine responded, “How can I permit myself to fear entering one of my own cities? Piliplok would return to its allegiance the moment I arrived!”

Carabella said, “Can you be certain of that? Here is Piliplok, puffed up with pride and selfishness: and here comes the Coronal, arriving in a worn-out floater, wearing mildewed rags. And will they hail you, do you think? They have committed treason, and they know it. They might compound that treason rather than risk yielding themselves mildly up to your authority. Best not to enter Piliplok except at the head of an army, I say!”

“And I,” Tunigorn added.

Valentine looked in dismay toward Deliamber, toward Sleet, toward Ermanar. They met his gaze silently, solemnly, sadly, bleakly.

“Then am I overthrown again?” Valentine asked, of no one in particular. “A ragged wanderer once more, am I? I dare not enter Piliplok? I dare not? And false Coronals in Khyntor and Ni-moya: they have armies, I suppose, and I have none, so I dare not go there either. What shall I do, become a juggler a second time?” He laughed. “No, I think not. Coronal is what I am: Coronal is what I shall remain. I thought I was done with this business of making repairs to my place in the world, but evidently not. Get me out of this jungle, Deliamber. Find me my way to the coast, to some port city that still gives me homage. And then we’ll go forth in search of allies, and set things to rights all over again, eh?”

“And where shall we find those allies, my lord?” Sleet asked.

“Wherever we can,” said Valentine with a shrug.

8

Throughout the journey down from Castle Mount through the valley of the Glayge to the Labyrinth, Hissune had seen signs, wherever he looked, of the turmoil that lay upon the land. Although in this gentle and fertile region of Alhanroel the situation had not yet grown as troubled as it was farther west, or in Zimroel, there was nevertheless a visible and virtually tangible tension everywhere: locked gates, frightened eyes, clenched faces. But in the Labyrinth itself, he thought, nothing seemed greatly to have changed, perhaps because the Labyrinth had always been a place of locked gates, frightened eyes, clenched faces.

Though the Labyrinth might not have changed, Hissune had; and the change was evident to him from the moment he entered the Mouth of Waters, that grand and opulent ceremonial gateway traditionally used by the Powers of Majipoor when coming into the city of the Pontifex. Behind him lay the warm hazy afternoon of the Glayge Valley, fragrant breezes, green hills, the joyous throbbing glow of rich sunlight. Ahead lay the eternal night of the Labyrinth’s secretive hermetic coils, the hard glitter of artificial lighting, the strange lifelessness of air that has never known the touch of wind or rain. And as he passed from the one realm to the other, Hissune imagined for just a flickering instant that a massive gate was clanging shut behind him, that some horrific barrier now separated him from all that was beautiful in the world; and he felt a chill of fear.

It surprised him that a mere year or two on Castle Mount could have worked such a transformation in him—that the Labyrinth, which he doubted he had ever loved, but where he had certainly felt at ease, should have become so repellent to him. And it seemed to him that he had not really understood, until this moment, the dread that Lord Valentine felt for the place: but Hissune had had a taste of it now, the merest tincture of it, enough to let him see for the first time what kind of terror it was that invaded the Coronal’s soul when he undertook this downward journey.

Hissune had changed in another way. When he had taken his leave of the Labyrinth he had been nobody in particular—a knight-initiate, to be sure, but that was no very important thing, especially to Labyrinth dwellers, not easily impressed by such matters of worldly pomp. Now he was returning just a few years later as Prince Hissune of the Council of Regency. Labyrinth dwellers might not be impressed by pomp, but they were by power, especially when it was one of their own that had attained it. Thousands of them lined the road that led from the Mouth of Blades to the Labyrinth’s outer ring, and they jostled and shoved to get a better look at him as he came riding through the great gateway aboard a royal floater that bore the Coronal’s own colors, and with a retinue of his own as if he were Coronal himself. They did not cheer or scream or call out his name. Labyrinth people were not known to do such things. But they stared. Silent, plainly awe-smitten, very likely envious, they watched him with a sullen fascination as he passed by. He imagined that he saw his old playmate Vanimoon in the crowd, and Vanimoon’s pretty sister, and Ghisnet and Heulan and half a dozen others of the old Guadeloom Court bunch. Perhaps not: perhaps it was only a trick of his mind that put them there. He realized that he wanted them to be there, wanted them to see him in his princely robes and his grand floater, scrappy little Hissune of Guadeloom Court transformed now into the Regent Prince Hissune, with the aura of the Castle crackling about him like the light of another sun. It’s all right to indulge in such petty pride once in a while, isn’t it? he asked himself. And he replied, Yes, yes, why not? You can allow yourself a little bit of small-mindedness once in a while. Even saints sometimes must feel smug, and you’ve never been accused of saintliness. But allow it, and be done with it, and move along to your tasks. A steady diet of self-congratulation bloats the soul.

Pontifical officials in formal masks were waiting for him at the edge of the outer ring. With great solicitousness they greeted Hissune and took him at once to the liftshaft reserved for Powers and their emissaries, which carried him swiftly down to the deep imperial levels of the Labyrinth.

In short order he was installed in a suite nearly as ostentatious as the one perpetually set aside for the Coronal’s own use. Alsimir and Stimion and Hissune’s other aides were given elegant rooms of their own adjoining his. When the Pontifical liaison officials were done bustling about seeing to Hissune’s comfort, their chief announced to him, “The high spokesman Hornkast will be deeply pleased to dine with you this evening, my lord.”

Despite himself, Hissune felt a little shiver of wonder. Deeply pleased. He still had enough of the Labyrinth in him to regard Hornkast with veneration bordering on fear: the real master of the Labyrinth, the puppeteer who pulled the Pontifex’s strings. Deeply pleased to dine with you this evening, my lord. Really? Hornkast? It was hard to imagine old Hornkast deeply pleased about anything, Hissune thought. My lord, no less. Well, well, well.

But he could not allow himself to be awed by Hornkast, not a vestige, not a trace. He contrived to be unready when the high spokesman’s envoys came calling for him, and was ten minutes late setting out. When he entered the high spokesman’s private dining chamber—a hall of such glittering magnificence that even a Pontifex might have found its grandeur excessive—Hissune restrained himself from offering any sort of salute or obeisance, though the impulse fluttered quickly through him. This is Hornkast! he thought, and wanted to drop to his knees. But you are Hissune! he told himself angrily, and remained standing, dignified, faintly aloof. Hornkast was, Hissune compelled himself to keep in mind, merely a civil servant; whereas he himself was a person of rank, a prince of the Mount, and a member of the Council of Regency as well.

It was difficult, though, not to be swayed by Hornkast’s formidable presence and power. He was old—ancient, even—yet he looked robust and energetic and alert, as though a witchery had stripped thirty or forty of his years from him. His eyes were shrewd and implacable, his smile was unsettlingly intricate, his voice deep and strong. With the greatest of courtesy he conducted Hissune to the table and offered him some rare glistening wine, a deep scarlet in hue, of which Hissune prudently took only the most shallow and widely spaced of sips. The conversation, amiable and general at first, then more serious, remained totally in Hornkast’s control, and Hissune did not resist that. They spoke at first of the disturbances in Zimroel and western Alhanroel—Hissune had the impression that Hornkast, for all his sober mien as he talked of these things, was no more deeply troubled by anything that took place outside the Labyrinth than he would be by events on some other world—and then the high spokesman came round to the matter of Elidath’s death, for which he hoped Hissune would convey full condolences when he returned to the Mount; and Hornkast stared keenly at Hissune as though to say, I know that the passing of Elidath has worked great changes in the succession, and that you have emerged into a most powerful position, and therefore, O child of this Labyrinth, I am watching you very carefully. Hissune expected that Hornkast, having heard enough of the news from overseas to be aware that Elidath was dead, would go on now to inquire after the safety of Lord Valentine; but to his amazement the high spokesman chose to speak next of other matters entirely, having to do with certain shortages now manifesting themselves in the granaries of the Labyrinth. No doubt that problem was much on Hornkast’s mind, Hissune thought; but it was not primarily to discuss such things that he had undertaken this journey. When the high spokesman paused for a moment Hissune, seizing the initiative at last, said, “But perhaps it is time for us to consider what I think is the most critical event of all, which is the disappearance of Lord Valentine.”

For once Hornkast’s invincible serenity seemed shaken: his eyes flashed, his nostrils flared, his lips quirked quickly in surprise.

“Disappearance?”

“While Lord Valentine was traveling in Piurifayne we lost contact with him, and we have not been able to reestablish it.”

“May I ask what the Coronal was doing in Piurifayne?”

Hissune offered a light shrug. “A mission of great delicacy, I am given to understand. He was separated from his party in the same storm that took Elidath’s life. We have heard nothing since.”

“And is the Coronal dead, do you think?”

“I have no idea, and guesses are without value. You can be sure we are making every effort to resume contact with him. But I think we must at least allow for the possibility that Lord Valentine is dead, yes. We have had discussions to that effect at the Castle. A plan of succession is emerging.”

“Ah.”

“And of course the health of the Pontifex is something that must figure prominently in our planning,” said Hissune.

“Ah. Yes. I quite understand.”

“The Pontifex, I take it, remains as he has been?”

Hornkast made no immediate reply, but stared at Hissune with mysterious and discomforting intensity a long while, as if engaged in the most intricate of political calculations.

Then at length he said, “Would you like to pay a call on his majesty?”

If not the last thing Hissune would have expected the high spokesman to say, it was close to it. A visit to the Pontifex? He had never dreamed of such a thing! It took him a moment to master his astonishment and regain his poise. Then he said, as coolly as he could manage it, “It would be a great privilege.”

“Let us go, then.”

“Now?”

“Now,” said Hornkast.

The high spokesman signaled; servitors appeared and began clearing away the remnants of the meal; moments later Hissune found himself aboard a small snub-nosed floater, with Hornkast beside him, traveling down a narrow tunnel until they came to a place where they could go only on foot, and where one bronze door after another sealed the passageway at fifty-pace intervals. Hornkast opened each of these by sliding his hand into a hidden panel, and eventually one final door, inscribed with a gold-chased Labyrinth symbol and the imperial monogram over it, yielded to the high spokesman’s touch and admitted them to the imperial throne-chamber.

Hissune’s heart pounded with terrifying force. The Pontifex! Old mad Tyeveras! Throughout all his life he had scarcely believed that any such person truly existed. Child of the Labyrinth that he was, he had regarded the Pontifex always as some sort of supernatural being, hidden away here in the depths, the reclusive master of the world; and even now, for all Hissune’s recent familiarity with princes and dukes and the household of the Coronal and the Coronal himself, he regarded the Pontifex as a being apart, dwelling in a realm of his own, invisible, unknowable, unreal, inconceivably remote from the world of ordinary beings.

But there he was.

It was exactly as the legend had it. The sphere of blue glass, the pipes and tubes and wires and clamps, the colored fluids bubbling in and out of their life-support chamber, and the old, old man within, sitting weirdly upright on the high-backed throne atop its three shallow steps. The eyes of the Pontifex were open. But did they see? Was he alive at all?

“He no longer speaks,” Hornkast said. “It is the latest of the changes. But the physician Sepulthrove says that his mind is still active, that his body retains its vitality. Go forward another step or two. You may look closely at him. See? See? He breathes. He blinks. He is alive. He is most definitely alive.”

Hissune felt as though he had stumbled into the presence of something of a former epoch, some prehistoric creature miraculously preserved. Tyeveras! Coronal to the Pontifex Ossier, how many generations ago? Survivor out of history. This man had seen Lord Kinniken with his own eyes. He had been old already when Lord Malibor came to the Castle. And here he still was: alive, yes, if this was in fact life.

Hornkast said, “You may greet him.”

Hissune knew the convention: one pretended not to speak directly to the Pontifex, but addressed one’s words to the high spokesman, pretending that the high spokesman would relay them to the monarch; but that was not actually done.

He said, “I pray you offer his majesty the greeting of his subject Prince Hissune son of Elsinome, who most humbly expresses his reverence and obedience.”

The Pontifex made no reply. The Pontifex showed no sign of having heard anything.

“Once.” said Hornkast, “he would make sounds that I learned to interpret, in response to what was said to him. No longer. He has not spoken in months. But we speak to him still, even so.”

Hissune said, “Tell the Pontifex, then, that he is beloved by all the world, and his name is constantly in our prayers.”

Silence. The Pontifex was motionless.

“Tell the Pontifex also,” Hissune said, “that the world turns on its course, that troubles come and go, that the greatness of Majipoor will be preserved.”

Silence. No response whatever.

“Are you done?” Hornkast asked.

Hissune stared across the room at the enigmatic figure within the glass cage. He longed to see Tyeveras stretch forth his hand in blessing, longed to hear him speak words of prophesy. But that would not happen, Hissune knew.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m done.”

“Come, then.”

The high spokesman led Hissune from the throne chamber. Outside, Hissune realized that his fine robes were soaked with sweat, that his knees were quivering. Tyeveras! If I live to be as old as he is, Hissune thought, I will never forget that face, those eyes, that blue sphere of glass.

Hornkast said, “It is a new phase, this silence. Sepulthrove maintains that he is still strong, and perhaps so. But possibly this is the beginning of the end. There must be some limit, even with all this machinery.”

“Do you think it will be soon?”

“I pray it is, but I have no way of knowing. We do nothing to hasten the end. That decision is in Lord Valentine’s hands—or in the hands of his successor, if Valentine no longer lives.”

“If Lord Valentine is dead,” said Hissune, “then the new Coronal might immediately ascend to Pontifex. Unless he too chooses to sustain the life of Tyeveras.”

“Indeed. And if Lord Valentine is dead, who then, do you think, will be that new Coronal?”

Hornkast’s stare was overwhelming and merciless. Hissune felt himself sizzling in the fire of that stare, and all his hard-won shrewdness, all his sense of who he was and what he meant to achieve melted from him, leaving him vulnerable and muddled. He had a sudden wild dizzying image of himself catapulted upward through the Powers, becoming Coronal one morning, giving the orders to disconnect this tubing and machinery at noon, becoming Pontifex by nightfall. But of course that was absurd, he told himself in panic. Pontifex? Me? Next month? It was a joke. It was altogether preposterous. He struggled for balance and succeeded after a moment in drawing himself back to the strategy that had seemed so obvious to him at the Castle: if Lord Valentine is dead, Divvis must become Coronal, and then Tyeveras at last must die, and Divvis goes to the Labyrinth. It must be that way. It must.

Hissune said, “The succession cannot, of course, be voted upon until we are certain of the Coronal’s death, and daily we offer our prayers for his safety. But if in fact some tragic fate has befallen Lord Valentine, I think it will be the pleasure of the Castle princes to invite the son of Lord Voriax to ascend the throne.”

“Ah.”

“And if that should come to pass, there are those of us who think it would be desirable then to allow the Pontifex Tyeveras at last to return to the Source.”

“Ah,” said Hornkast. “Ah, yes. You make your meaning quite clear, do you not?” His eyes met Hissune’s one final time: cold, penetrating, all-seeing. Then they grew milder, as though a veil had been drawn over them, and suddenly the high spokesman seemed to be nothing more than a weary old man at the end of a long and fatiguing day. Hornkast turned away and walked slowly toward the waiting floater. “Come,” he said. “It grows late, Prince Hissune.”

Late it was indeed, but Hissune found it all but impossible to sleep. I have seen the Pontifex, he thought again and again. I have seen the Pontifex. He lay awake and tossing half the night, with the image of the ancient Tyeveras blazing in his mind; nor did that image relent when sleep did come, but burned even brighter, Pontifex on throne within sphere of glass. And was the Pontifex weeping? Hissune wondered. And if he wept, for whom did he weep?

At midday the next day Hissune, accompanied by an official escort, made the journey uplevel to the outer ring of the Labyrinth, to Guadeloom Court, to the drab little flat where he had lived so long.

Elsinome had insisted that it was wrong for him to come, that it was a grave breach of protocol for a Prince of the Castle to visit so shabby a place as Guadeloom Court even for the sake of seeing his own mother. But Hissune had brushed her objections aside. “I will come to you,” he said. “You must not come to me, mother.”

She seemed not greatly altered by the years since they last had met. If anything, she looked stronger, taller, more vigorous. But there was an unfamiliar wariness about her, he thought. He held out his arms to her and she held back, uneasy, almost as if she did not recognize him as her son.

“Mother?” he said. “You know me, don’t you, mother?”

“I want to think I do.”

“I am no different, mother.”

“The way you hold yourself, now—the look in your eye—the robes you wear—”

“I am still Hissune.”

“Prince Regent Hissune. And you say you are no different?”

“Everything is different now, mother. But some things remain the same.” She appeared to soften a little at that, to relax, to accept him. He went to her and embraced her.

Then she stepped back. “What will happen to the world, Hissune? We hear such terrible things! They say whole provinces have starved. New Coronals have proclaimed themselves. And Lord Valentine—where is Lord Valentine? We know so little down here of what goes on outside. What will happen to the world, Hissune?”

Hissune shook his head. “It is all in the hands of the Divine, mother. But I tell you this: if there is a way to save the world from this disaster, we will save it.”

“I feel myself beginning to shiver, when I hear you say we. Sometimes in dreams I see you on Castle Mount, among the great lords and princes—I see them looking to you, I see them asking your advice. But can it be true? I am coming to understand certain things—the Lady visits me often when I sleep, do you know that?—but even so, there is so much to understand—so much that I must absorb—”

“The Lady visits you often, you say?”

“Sometimes two or three times a week. I am greatly privileged by that. Although it troubles me, also: to see her so tired, to feel the weight that presses on her soul. She comes to me to help me, you know, but yet I feel sometimes that I should help her, that I should lend my strength to her and let her lean on me—”

“You will, mother.”

“Do I understand you rightly, Hissune?”

For a long moment he did not reply. He glanced about the ugly little room at all the old familiar things of his childhood, the tattered curtains, the weary furniture, and he thought of the suite where he had passed the night, and of the apartments that were his on Castle Mount.

He said, “You will not remain in this place much longer, mother.”

“Where am I to go, then?”

Again he hesitated.

Quietly he said, “I think they will make me Coronal, mother. And when they do, you must go to the Isle, and take up a new and difficult task. Do you comprehend what I say?”

“Indeed.”

“And are you prepared, mother?”

“I will do what I must,” she told him, and she smiled, and shook her head as though in disbelief. And shook the disbelief away, and reached forth to take him into her arms.

9

“Now let the word go forth,” Faraataa said.

It was the Hour of the Flame, the midday hour, and the sun stood high over Piurifayne. There would be no rain today: rain was impermissible today, for this was the day of the going forth of the word, and that was a thing that must be accomplished under a rainless sky.

He stood atop a towering wicker scaffold, looking out over the vast clearing in the jungle that his followers had made. Thousands of trees felled, a great slash upon the breast of the land; and in that huge open space his people stood, shoulder to shoulder, as far as he could see. To each side of him rose the steep pyramidal forms of the new temples, nearly as lofty as his scaffold. They were built of crossed logs, interwoven in the ancient patterns, and from their summits flew the two banners of redemption, the red and the yellow. This was New Velalisier, here in the jungle. Next year at this time, Faraataa was resolved, these rites would be celebrated at the true Velalisier across the sea, reconsecrated at last.

He performed now the Five Changes, easily and serenely journeying from form to form: the Red Woman, the Blind Giant, the Flayed Man, the Final King, each Change punctuated by a hissing outcry from those who looked on, and when he underwent the fifth of the Changes, and stood forth in the form of the Prince To Come, the sound was overwhelming. They were crying out his name now in mounting crescendos: “Faraataa! Faraataa! FARAATAA!”

“I am the Prince To Come and the King That Is,” he cried, as he had so often cried in his dreams.

And they replied: “All hail the Prince To Come, who is the King That Is!”

And he said, “Join your hands together, and your spirits, and let us call the water-kings.”

And they joined hands and spirits, and he felt the strength of them surging into him, and he sent out his call:

—Brothers in the sea!

He heard their music. He felt their great bodies stirring in the depths. All the kings responded: Maazmoorn, Girouz, Sheitoon, Diis, Narain, and more. And joined, and gave of their strength, and made from themselves a trumpet for his words.

And his words went forth, to every land, to all who had the capacity to hear.

—You who are our enemy, listen! Know that the war is proclaimed against you, and you are already defeated. The time of reckoning has come. You cannot withstand us. You cannot withstand us. You have begun to perish, and there is no saving you now.

And the voices of his people rose about him: “Faraataa! Faraataa! Faraataa!”

His skin began to gleam. His eyes emitted a radiance. He had become the Prince To Come; he had become the King That Is.

—For fourteen thousand years this world has been yours, and now we have regained it. Go from it, all you strangers! Get into your ships and take yourselves to the stars from which you came, for this world now is ours. Go!

“Faraataa! Faraataa!”

—Go, or feel our heavy wrath! Go, or be driven into the sea! Go, or we will spare none of you!

“Faraataa!”

He spread wide his arms. He opened himself to the surging energies of all those whose souls were linked before him, and of the water-kings who were his sustenance and his comfort. The time of exile and sorrow, he knew, was ending. The holy war was nearly won. Those who had stolen the world and spread themselves across it like a swarm of marauding insects now would be crushed.

—Hear me, O enemies. I am the King That Is!

And the silent voices cried in deafening tones:

—Hear him, O enemies. He is the King That Is!

—Your time has come! Your day is done! Your crimes will be punished, and none will survive! Go from our world!

—Go from our world!

“Faraataa!” they cried aloud. “Faraataa! Faraataa!”

“I am the Prince To Come. I am the King That Is!”

And they answered him, “All hail the Prince To Come, who is the King That Is!”