Lord Valentine's Castle

—1—

THE GHAYROG CITY OF DULORN was an architectural marvel, a city of frosty brilliance that extended for two hundred miles up and down the heart of the great Dulorn Rift. Though it covered so huge an area, the city’s predominant thrust was vertical: great shining towers, fanciful of design but severely restrained in material, that rose like tapered fangs from the soft gypsum-rich ground. The only approved building material in Dulorn was the native stone of the region, a light, airy calcite of high refractive index, that glittered like fine crystal, or perhaps like diamond. Out of this the Dulornese had fashioned their sharp-tipped high-rise structures and embellished them with parapets and balconies, with enormous flamboyant flying buttresses, with soaring cantilevered ribs, with stalactites and stalagmites of sparkling facets, with lacy bridges far above the streets, with colonnades and domes and pendentives and pagodas. The juggling troupe of Zalzan Kavol, approaching the city from the west, came upon it almost exactly at noon, when the sun stood straight overhead and streaks of white flame seemed to dance along the flanks of the titanic towers. Valentine caught his breath in wonder. Such a vast place! Such a wondrous show of light and form!

Fourteen million people dwelled in Dulorn, making it one of the larger cities of Majipoor, although by no means the largest. On the continent of Alhanroel, so Valentine had heard, a city of this size would be nothing remarkable, and even here on the more pastoral continent of Zimroel there were many that matched or surpassed it. But surely no place could equal its beauty, he thought. Dulorn was cold and fiery, both at once. Its gleaming spires insistently claimed one’s attention, like chill, irresistible music, like the piercing tones of some mighty organ rolling out across the darkness of space.

"No country inns for us here!" Carabella cried happily. "We’ll have a hotel, with fine sheets and soft cushions!"

"Will Zalzan Kavol be so generous?" Valentine asked.

"Generous?" Carabella laughed. "He has no choice. Dulorn offers only luxury accommodations. If we sleep here, we sleep in the street or we sleep like dukes: there’s nothing between."

"Like dukes," Valentine said. "To sleep like dukes. Why not?"

He had sworn her, that morning before leaving the inn, to say nothing to anyone about last night’s events, not to Sleet, not to any of the Skandars, not even, should she feel the need to seek one, to a dream-speaker. He had demanded the oath of silence from her in the name of the Lady, the Pontifex, and the Coronal. Furthermore he had compelled her to continue to behave toward him as though he had always been, and for the rest of his life would remain, merely Valentine the wandering juggler. In extracting the oath from her Valentine had spoken with force and dignity worthy of a Coronal, so that poor Carabella, kneeling and trembling, was as frightened of him all over again as if he were wearing the starburst crown. He felt more than a little fraudulent about that, for he was far from convinced that the strange dreams of the previous night were to be taken at face value. But still, those dreams could not lightly be dismissed, and so precautions must be taken, secrecy, guile. They came strangely to him, such maneuvers. He swore Autifon Deliamber also to the oath, wondering as he did so how much he could trust a Vroon and a sorcerer, but there seemed to be sincerity in Deliamber’s voice as he vowed to keep his confidence.

Deliamber said, "And who else knows of these matters?"

"Only Carabella. And I have her bound by the same pledge."

"You’ve said nothing to the Hjort?"

"Vinorkis? Not a word. Why do you ask?"

The Vroon replied, "He watches you too carefully. He asks too many questions. I have little liking for him."

Valentine shrugged. "It’s not hard to dislike Hjorts. But what do you fear?"

"He guards his mind too well. His aura is a dark one. Keep your distance from him. Valentine, or he’ll bring you trouble."

The jugglers entered the city and made their way down broad dazzling avenues to their hotel, guided by Deliamber, who seemed to have a map of every corner of Majipoor engraved in his mind. The wagon halted in front of a tower of splendid height and awesome fantasy of architecture, a place of minarets and arched vaults and shining octagonal windows. Descending from the wagon, Valentine stood blinking and gaping in awe.

"You look as though you’ve been clubbed on the head," Zalzan Kavol said gruffly. "Never seen Dulorn before?"

Valentine made an evasive gesture. His porous memory said nothing to him of Dulorn: but who, once having seen this city, could forget it?

Some comment seemed called for. He said simply, "Is there anything more glorious on all of Majipoor?"

"Yes," the gigantic Skandar replied. "A tureen of hot soup. A mug of strong wine. A sizzling roast over an open fire. You can’t eat beautiful architecture. Castle Mount itself isn’t worth a stale turd to a starving man." Zalzan Kavol snorted in high self-approbation and, hefting his luggage, strode into the hotel.

Valentine called bemusedly after him, "But I was speaking only of the beauty of cities!"

Thelkar, usually the most taciturn of the Skandars, said, "Zalzan Kavol admires Dulorn more than you would believe. But he’d never admit it."

"He admits admiration only for Piliplok, where we were born," Gibor Haern put in. "He feels it’s disloyal to say a good word for anyplace else."

"Shh!" cried Erfon Kavol. "He comes!"

Their senior brother had reappeared at the hotel door. "Well?" Zalzan Kavol boomed. "Why are you standing about? Rehearsal in thirty minutes!" His yellow eyes blazed like those of some beast of the woods. He growled, clenched his four fists menacingly, and vanished again.

An odd master, Valentine thought. Somewhere far beneath that shaggy hide, he suspected, lay a person of civility and even — who could tell? — of kindness. But Zalzan Kavol worked hard at his bearishness.

The jugglers were booked to perform at the Perpetual Circus of Dulorn, a municipal festivity that was in progress during every hour of the day and on every day of the year. The Ghayrogs, who dominated this city and its surrounding province, slept not nightly but seasonally, for two or three months at a time mainly in winter, and when they were awake were insatiable in their demand for entertainment. According to Deliamber they paid well and there were never enough itinerant performers in this part of Majipoor to satisfy their needs.

When the troupe gathered for the afternoon practice session, Zalzan Kavol announced that tonight’s engagement was due to take place between the fourth and sixth hours after midnight.

Valentine was unhappy about that. This night in particular he was eager for the guidance that dreams might bring, after last night’s weighty revelations. But what chance could there be for useful dreams if he spent the most fertile hours of the night on stage?

"We can sleep earlier," Carabella observed. "Dreams come at any hour. Or do you have an appointment for a sending?"

It was a sly teasing remark, for one who had trembled in awe of him not so much earlier. He smiled to show he had taken no offense — he could see self-doubt lurking just beneath her mockery of him — and said, "I might not sleep at all, knowing that I must rise so early."

"Have Deliamber touch you as he did last night," she suggested.

"I prefer to find my own path into sleep," he said.

Which he did, after a stiff afternoon of practice and a satisfying dinner of wind-dried beef and cold blue wine at the hotel. He had taken a room by himself here, and before he entered the bed — cool smooth sheets, as Carabella had said, fit for a duke — he commended his spirit to the Lady of the Isle and prayed for a sending from her, which was permissible and frequently done, though not often effective. It was the Lady now whose aid he most dearly needed. If he was in truth a fallen Coronal, then she was his fleshly mother as well as his spiritual one, and might confirm him in his identity and direct him along his quest.

As he moved into sleep, he tried to visualize the Lady and her Isle, to reach out across the thousands of miles to her and create a bridge, some spark of consciousness over that immense gap, by which she could make contact with him. He was hampered by the empty places in his memory. Presumably any adult Majipooran knew the features of the Lady and the geography of the Isle as well as he did the face of his own mother and the outskirts of his city, but Valentine’s crippled mind gave him mainly blanks, which had to be filled by imagination and chance. How had she looked that night in the fireworks over Pidruid? A round smiling face, long thick hair. Very well. And the rest? Suppose the hair is black and glossy, black like that of her sons Lord Valentine and dead Lord Voriax. The eyes are brown, warm, alert. The lips full, the cheeks lightly dimpled, a fine network of wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. A stately, robust woman, yes, and she strolls through a garden of lush floriferous bushes, yellow tanigales and camellias and eldirons and purple thwales, everything rich with tropical life; she pauses to pluck a blossom and fasten it in her hair, and moves on, along white marble flagstones that wind sinuously between the shrubs, until she emerges on a broad stone patio set into the side of the hill on which she dwells, looking down on the terraces upon terraces descending in wide sweeping curves toward the sea. And she looks westward to far-off Zimroel, she closes her eyes, she thinks of her lost wandering outcast son in the city of the Ghayrogs, she gathers her force and broadcasts sweet messages of hope and courage to Valentine exiled in Dulorn — Valentine slipped into deep sleep.

And indeed the Lady came to him as he dreamed. He encountered her not on the hillside below her garden, but in some empty city in a wasteland, a ruined place of weather-beaten sandstone pillars and shattered altars. They approached one another from opposite sides of a tumbledown forum under ghostly moonlight. But her face was veiled and she kept it averted from him: he recognized her by the heavy coils of her dark hair and by the fragrance of the creamy-petaled eldiron flower beside her ear, and knew that he was in the presence of the Lady of the Isle, but he wanted her smile to warm his soul in this bleak place, he wanted the comfort of her gentle eyes, and he saw only the veil, the shoulders, the side of her head. "Mother?" he asked uncertainly. "Mother, it’s Valentine! Don’t you know me? Look at me, mother!"

Wraithlike she drifted past him, and disappeared between two broken columns inscribed with scenes of the deeds of the great Coronals, and was gone.

"Mother?" he called.

The dream was over. Valentine struggled to make her return, but could not. He awakened and lay peering into the darkness, seeing that veiled figure once more and searching for meaning. She hadn’t recognized him. Was he so effectively transformed that not even his own mother could perceive who lay hidden in this body? Or had he never been her son, so that there was no reason for her to know him? He lacked answers. If the soul of dark-haired Lord Valentine was embedded in the body of fair-haired Valentine, the Lady of the Isle in his dream had given no sign of it, and he was as far from understanding as he had been when he closed his eyes.

What follies I pursue, he thought. What implausible speculations, what madnesses!

He eased himself back into sleep.

And almost at once, so it seemed, a hand touched his shoulder and someone rocked him until he came reluctantly into wakefulness. Carabella.

"Two hours after midnight," she told him. "Zalzan Kavol wants us down by the wagon in half an hour. Did you dream?"

"Inconclusively. And you?"

"I remained awake," she answered. "It seemed safest. Some nights one prefers not to dream." She said timidly, as he began to dress, "Will I share your room again, Valentine?"

"Would you like to?"

"I have given oath to act with you as I acted before — before I knew — Oh, Valentine, I was so frightened! But yes. Yes, let’s be companions again, and even lovers. Tomorrow night!"

"What if I am Coronal?"

"Please. Don’t ask such questions."

"What if I am?"

"You’ve ordered me to call you Valentine and to regard you as Valentine. This I’ll do, if you’ll let me."

"Do you believe I’m Coronal?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"It no longer frightens you?"

"A little. Just a little. You still seem human to me."

"Good."

"I’ve had a day to get used to things. And I’m under an oath. I must think of you as Valentine. I swore by the Powers to that." She grinned impishly. "I swore an oath to the Coronal that I would pretend you are not Coronal, and so I must be true to my pledge, and treat you casually, and call you Valentine, and show no fear of you, and behave as though nothing has changed. And so I can share your bed tomorrow night?"

"Yes."

"I love you, Valentine."

He pulled her lightly to him. "I thank you for overcoming your fear. I love you, Carabella."

"Zalzan Kavol will be angry if we’re late," she said.

—2—

THE PERPETUAL CIRCUS was housed in a structure altogether opposite from those most typical of Dulorn: a giant flat unadorned drum of a building, perfectly circular and no more than ninety feet high, that stood by itself on a huge tract of open land on the eastern perimeter of the city. Within, a great central space provided an awesome setting for the stage, and around it ran the seating ring, tier upon tier in concentric circles rising to the roof.

The place could hold thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Valentine was startled to see how nearly full it was, here at what was for him the middle of the night. Looking outward into the audience was difficult, for the stage-lights were in his eyes, but he was able to perceive enormous numbers of people sitting or sprawling in their seats. Nearly all were Ghayrogs, though he caught sight of the occasional Hjort or Vroon or human making a late night of it. There were no places on Majipoor entirely populated by one race — ancient decrees of the government, going back to the earliest days of heavy non-human settlement, forbade such concentrations except on the Metamorph reservation — but the Ghayrogs were a particularly clannish lot, and tended to cluster together in and around Dulorn up to the legal maximum. Though warm-blooded and mammalian, they had certain reptilian traits that made them unlovable to most other races: quick-flicking forked red tongues, grayish scaly skin of a thick, polished consistency, cold green unblinking eyes. Their hair had a medusoid quality, black succulent strands that coiled and writhed unsettlingly, and their odor, both sweet and acrid at once, was not charming to non-Ghayrog nostrils.

Valentine’s mood was subdued as he moved out with the troupe onto the stage. The hour was all wrong: his body-cycles were at low ebb, and though he had had enough sleep, he had no enthusiasm for being awake just now. Once again he carried the burden of a difficult dream. That rejection by the Lady, that inability to make contact with her, what did it signify? When he was only Valentine the juggler, significance was insignificant to him: each day had a path of its own, and he had no worries about larger patterns, only to increase the skill of hand and eye from one day to the next. But now that these ambiguous and disturbing revelations had been visited upon him he was forced to consider dreary long-range matters of purpose and destiny and the route on which he was bound. He had no liking for that. Already he tasted a keen nostalgic sorrow for the good old times of the week before last, when he had wandered busy Pidruid in happy aimlessness.

The demands of his art quickly lifted him out of this brooding. There was no time, under the glare of the spotlights, to think of anything except the work of performing.

The stage was colossal, and many things were happening on it at once. Vroon magicians were doing a routine involving floating colored lights and bursts of green and red smoke; an animal-trainer just beyond had a dozen fat serpents standing on their tails; a dazzling group of dancers with grotesquely attenuated bodies sprayed in many-faceted silver glowstuff did austere leaps and carries; several small orchestras in widely separated regions played the tinny and tootling woodwind music beloved of the Ghayrogs; there was a one-finger acrobat, a high-wire woman, a levitator, a trio of glassblowers engaged in fashioning a cage for themselves, an eel-eater, and a platoon of berserk clowns, along with much more beyond Valentine’s range of vision. The audience, slouching and lounging out there in the half-darkness, had an easy time watching all this, for, Valentine realized, the giant stage was in gentle motion, turning slowly on hidden bearings, and in the course of an hour or two would make a complete circuit, presenting each group of performers in turn to every part of the auditorium. "It all floats on a pool of quicksilver," Sleet whispered. "You could buy three provinces with the value of the metal."

With so much competition for the eyes of the onlookers, the jugglers had brought forth some of their finest effects, which meant that the novice Valentine was largely excluded, left to toss clubs to himself and occasionally to feed knives or torches to the others. Carabella was dancing atop a silver globe two feet in diameter that rolled in irregular circles as she moved: she juggled five spheres that glowed with brilliant green light. Sleet had mounted stilts, and rose even taller than the Skandars, a tiny figure far above everyone, coolly flipping from hand to hand three huge red-and-black-speckled eggs of the moleeka-hen, that he had bought at market that evening. If he dropped an egg from so great a height, the splash would be conspicuous and the humiliation enormous, but never since Valentine had known him had Sleet dropped anything, and he dropped no eggs tonight. As for the six Skandars, they had arranged themselves in a rigid star-pattern, standing with their backs to one another, and were juggling flaming torches. At carefully coordinated moments each would hurl a torch backward over his outer shoulder to his brother at the opposite side of the star. The interchanges were made with wondrous precision, the trajectories of the flying torches were flawlessly timed to create splendid crisscrossing patterns of light, and not a hair on any Skandar’s hide was scorched as they casually snatched from the air the firebrands that came hurtling past them from their unseen partners.

Round and round the stage they went, performing in stints of half an hour at a stretch, with five minutes to relax in the central well just below the stage, where hundreds of other off-duty artists gathered. Valentine longed to be doing something more challenging than his own little elementary juggle, but Zalzan Kavol had forbidden it: he was not yet ready, the Skandar said, though he was doing excellently well for a novice.

Morning came before the troupe was allowed to leave the stage. Payment here was by the hour, and hiring was governed by silent response-meters beneath the seats of the audience, monitored by cold-eyed Ghayrogs in a booth in the well. Some performers lasted only a few minutes before universal boredom or disdain banished them, but Zalzan Kavol and his company, who had been guaranteed two hours of work, remained on stage for four. They would have been kept for a fifth if Zalzan Kavol had not been dissuaded by his brothers, who gathered around him for a brief and intense argument.

"His greed," Carabella said quietly, "will lead him to embarrass himself yet. How long does he think people can throw those torches around before someone slips up? Even Skandars get tired eventually."

"Not Zalzan Kavol, from the looks of it," Valentine said.

"He may be a juggling machine, yes, but his brothers are mortal. Rovorn’s timing is starting to get ragged. I’m glad they had the courage to make a stand." She smiled. "And I was getting pretty tired too."

So successfully were the jugglers received in Dulorn that they were hired for four additional days. Zalzan Kavol was elated — the Ghayrogs gave their entertainers high wages — and declared a five-crown bonus for everyone.

All well and good, Valentine thought. But he had no wish to settle in indefinitely among the Ghayrogs. After the second day, restlessness began to make him chafe.

"You wish to be moving on," Deliamber said — a statement, not a question.

Valentine nodded. "I begin to glimpse the shape of the road ahead of me."

"To the Isle?"

"Why do you bother speaking with people," Valentine said lightly, "if you see everything within their minds?"

"I did no mind-peeking this time. Your next move is obvious enough."

"Go to the Lady, yes. Who else can truly tell me who I am?"

"You still have doubts," Deliamber said.

"I have no evidence other than dreams."

"Which speak powerful truths."

"Yes," Valentine said, "but dreams can be parables, dreams can be metaphors, dreams can be fantasies. It’s folly to speak them literally without confirmation. And the Lady can give confirmation, or so I hope. How far is it to the Isle, wizard?"

Deliamber briefly closed his large golden eyes. "Thousands of miles," he said. "We are now perhaps a fifth of the way across Zimroel. You must make your way eastward through Khyntor or Velathys, and around the territory of the Metamorphs, and then perhaps by riverboat via Ni-moya to Piliplok, where the pilgrim-ships leave for the Isle."

"How long will that take?"

"To reach Piliplok? At our present pace, about fifty years. Wandering with these jugglers, stopping here and there for a week at a time—"

"What if I left the troupe and went on my own?"

"Six months, possibly. The river journey is swift. The overland section takes much longer. If we had airships as they do on other worlds it would be a matter of a day or two to Piliplok, but of course we do without many devices on Majipoor that other people enjoy."

"Six months?" Valentine frowned. "And the cost, if I hired a vehicle and a guide?"

"Perhaps twenty royals. You’ll juggle a long time to earn that much."

"When I get to Piliplok," Valentine said, "what then?"

"You book passage to the Isle. The voyage is a matter of weeks. When you reach the Isle you take lodging on the lowest terrace and begin the ascent."

"The ascent?"

"A course of prayer, purification, and initiation. You move upward from terrace to terrace until you reach the Terrace of Adoration, which is the threshold to Inner Temple. You know nothing of any of this?"

"My mind, Deliamber, has been meddled with."

"Of course."

"At Inner Temple, then?"

"You are now an initiate. You serve the Lady as an acolyte, and if you seek an audience with her, you undergo special rites and await the summoning dream."

Uneasily Valentine said, "How long does this entire process take, the terraces, the initiation, the service as acolyte, the summoning dream?"

"It varies. Five years, sometimes. Ten. Forever, conceivably. The Lady has no time for each and every pilgrim."

"And there’s no more direct way of gaining audience?"

Deliamber uttered the thick coughing sound that was his laugh. "What? Knock on the temple door, cry out that you are her changeling son, demand entry?"

"Why not?"

"Because," the Vroon said, "the outer terraces of the Isle are designed as filters to keep such things from happening. There are no easy channels of communication to the Lady, and deliberately so. It would take you years."

"I’d find a way." Valentine stared levelly at the little wizard. "I could reach her mind, if I were on the Isle. I could cry out to her, I could persuade her to summon me. Perhaps."

"Perhaps."

"With your assistance it could be done."

"I feared that was coming," said Deliamber dryly.

"You have some skill at making sendings. We could reach, if not the Lady herself, then those close to her. Step by step, drawing ourselves closer to her, cutting short the interminable process on the terraces—"

"It could be done, possibly," Deliamber said. "Do you believe I’m minded to make the pilgrimage with you, though?"

Valentine regarded the Vroon in silence for a long time.

"I’m certain of it," he said finally. "You play at reluctance, but you’ve engineered my every motive to impel me toward the Isle. With you at my side. Am I right? Eh, Deliamber? You’re more eager to have me get there than I am myself."

"Ah," the sorcerer said. "It comes out now!"

"Am I right?"

"If you resolve to go to the Isle, Valentine, I will be at your side. But are you resolved?"

"Sometimes."

"Intermittent resolutions lack potency," said Deliamber.

"Thousands of miles. Years of waiting. Toil and intrigue. Why do I want to do this, Deliamber?"

"Because you are Coronal, and must be again."

"The first may be true, though I have mighty doubts of it. The second is open to question."

Deliamber’s look was crafty. "You prefer to live under the rule of a usurper?"

"What’s the Cordial and his rule to me? He’s half a world away on Castle Mount and I’m a wandering juggler." Valentine extended his fingers and stared at them as though he had never seen his hands before. "I could spare myself much effort if I remained with Zalzan Kavol and let the other, whoever he may be, keep the throne. Suppose he’s a wise and just usurper? Where’s the benefit for Majipoor, if I do all this work merely to put myself back in his place? Oh, Deliamber, Deliamber, do I sound like a king at all, when I say these things? Where’s my lust for. power? How can I ever have been a ruler, when I so obviously don’t care about what’s happened?"

"We’ve spoken of this before. You have been tampered with, my lord. Your spirit as well as your face has been changed."

"Even so. My royal nature, if ever I had one, is altogether gone from me. That lust for power—"

"Twice you’ve used the phrase," Deliamber said. "Lust has nothing to do with it. A true king doesn’t lust for power: responsibility lusts for him. And takes him, and possesses him. This Coronal is new, he has done little yet but make the grand processional, and already the people grumble at his early decrees. And you ask if he will be wise and just? How can any usurper be just? He is a criminal, Valentine, and he rules already with a criminal’s guilty fears eating at his dreams, and as time goes on those fears will poison him and he will be a tyrant. Can you doubt that? He will remove anyone who threatens him — will kill, even, if need be. The poison that courses in his veins will enter the life of the planet itself, will affect every citizen. And you, sitting here looking at your fingers, do you see no responsibility? How can you talk of sparing yourself much effort? As if it hardly matters who is the king. It matters very much who is the king, my lord, and you were chosen and trained for it, and not by lottery. Or do you believe anyone can become Coronal?"

"I do. By random stroke of fate."

Deliamber laughed harshly. "Possibly that was true nine thousand years ago. There is a dynasty, my lord."

"An adoptive dynasty?"

"Precisely. Since the time of Lord Arioc, and maybe even earlier, Coronals have been chosen from among a small group of families, no more than a hundred clans, all of them dwellers on Castle Mount and close participants in the government. The next Coronal is already in training, though only he and a few advisers know who he is, and two or three replacements for him must also have been chosen. But now the line is broken, now an intruder has pushed his way in. Nothing but evil can come of that."

"What if the usurper is simply the heir-in-waiting, who grew tired of waiting?"

"No," said Deliamber. "Inconceivable. No one deemed qualified to be Coronal would overthrow a lawfully consecrated prince. Besides, why the mummery of pretending to be Lord Valentine, if he is another?"

"I grant you that."

"Grant me also this: that the person atop Castle Mount now has neither right nor qualification for being there, and must be cast down, and you are the only one who can do it."

Valentine sighed. "You ask a great deal."

"History asks a great deal," said Deliamber. "History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason. And the forces of order and creation and reason have been focused always in a single leader, a king, if you will, or a president, a chairman, a grand minister, a generalissimo, use whatever word you wish, a monarch by some name or other. Here it is the Coronal, or more accurately the Coronal ruling as the voice of the Pontifex who was once Coronal, and it matters, my lord, it matters very much, who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal."

"Yes," Valentine said. "Perhaps."

"You’ll go on wavering from yes to perhaps a long while," said Deliamber. "But yes will govern, in the end. And you will make the pilgrimage to the Isle, and with the Lady’s blessing you will march on Castle Mount and take your rightful place."

"The things you say fill me with terror. If ever I had the ability to rule, if ever I was given the training for it, these things have been burned from my mind."

"The terror will fade. Your mind will be made whole in the passing of time."

"And time passes, and here we sit in Dulorn, to amuse the Ghayrogs."

Deliamber said, "Not much longer. We’ll find our way eastward, my lord. Have faith in that."

There was something contagious about Deliamber’s assurance. Valentine’s hesitations and uncertainties were gone — for the moment. But when Deliamber had departed, Valentine gave way to uncomfortable contemplation of certain hard realities. Could he simply hire a couple of mounts and set off for Piliplok with Deliamber tomorrow? What about Carabella, who had suddenly become very important to him? Abandon her here in Dulorn? And Shanamir? The boy was attached to Valentine, not to the Skandars: he neither could nor would be left. There was the cost, then, of a journey for four across nearly all of vast Zimroel, food, lodging, transportation, then the pilgrim ship to the Isle, and what then of expenses on the Isle while he schemed to gain access to the Lady? Autifon Deliamber had guessed it might cost twenty royals for him to travel alone to Piliplok. The cost, for the four of them, or for the five if Sleet were added, though Valentine had no idea if Sleet would care to come, might run a hundred royals or more, a hundred fifty perhaps to the lowest terrace of the Isle. He sorted through his purse. Of the money he had had upon him when he found himself outside Pidruid, he had more than sixty royals left, plus a royal or two that he had earned with the troupe. Not enough, not nearly enough. Carabella, he knew, was almost without money; Shanamir had dutifully returned to his family the hundred sixty royals from the sale of his mounts; and Deliamber, if he had any wealth, would not in old age be hauling himself through the countryside under contract to a crowd of ruffian Skandars.

So, then? Nothing to do but wait, and plan, and hope that Zalzan Kavol intended a generally eastward route. And save his crowns and bide his time, until the moment was ripe for going to the Lady.

—3—

A FEW DAYS AFTER THEIR departure from Dulorn, purses bulging with the generous Ghayrog pay, Valentine drew Zalzan Kavol aside to ask him about the direction of travel. It was a gentle late-summer day, and here, where they were camped for lunch along the eastern, slope of the Rift, a purple mist enfolded everything, a low thick clammy cloud that took its delicate lavender color from pigments in the air, for there were deposits of skuvva-sand just north of here and the winds were constantly stirring the stuff aloft.

Zalzan Kavol looked uncomfortable and irritable in this weather. His gray fur, purpled now by droplets of mist, was clumped in comic bunches, and he rubbed at it, trying to restore it to its proper nap. Probably not the best moment for such a conference, Valentine realized, but it was too late: the issue had been broached.

Zalzan Kavol said hollowly, "Which of us is the leader of this troupe, Valentine?"

"You are, beyond question."

"Then why do you try to govern me?"

"I?"

"In Pidruid," the Skandar said, "you asked me to go next to Falkynkip, for the convenience of your herdsman squire’s family honor, and I remind you that you forced me to hire the herdsman boy in the first place, though he is no juggler and never will be. In these things I yielded, I know not why. There was also the matter of your interfering in my quarrel with the Vroon—"

"My interference had benefit," Valentine pointed out, "as you yourself admitted at the time."

"True. But interference of itself is unfamiliar to me. Do you understand that I am absolute master of this troupe?"

Valentine shrugged lightly. "No one disputes that."

"But do you understand it? My brothers do. They are aware that a body can have only one head — unless it’s a Su-Suheris body, and we’re not talking of those — and here I am the head, it is from my mind that plans and instructions flow, and mine alone." Zalzan Kavol flashed an austere smile. "Is this tyranny? No. This is simple efficiency. Jugglers can never be democrats, Valentine. One mind designs the patterns, one alone, or there is chaos. Now what do you want with me?"

"Only to know the shape of our route."

With barely suppressed anger Zalzan Kavol said, "Why? You are in our employ. You go where we go. Your curiosity is misplaced."

"It doesn’t seem that way to me. Some routes are more useful to me than others."

"Useful? To you? You have plans? You told me you had no plans!"

"I do now."

"What do you plan, then?"

Valentine took a deep breath. "Ultimately to make the pilgrimage to the Isle, and become a devotee of the Lady. Since the pilgrim-ships sail from Piliplok, and all of Zimroel lies between us and Piliplok, it would be valuable to me to know whether you plan to go in some other direction, let’s say down to Velathys, or maybe back to Til-omon or Narabal, instead of—"

"You are discharged from my service," Zalzan Kavol said icily.

Valentine was astounded. "What?"

"Terminated. My brother Erfon will give you ten crowns as your settlement. I want you on your way within an hour."

Valentine felt his cheeks growing hot. "This is totally unexpected! I merely asked—"

"You merely asked. And in Pidruid you merely asked, and in Falkynkip you merely asked, and next week in Mazadone you would merely ask. You annoy my tranquillity, Valentine, and this cancels out your promise as a juggler. Besides, you are disloyal."

"Disloyal? To what? To whom?"

"You hire on with us, but secretly mean to use us as the vehicle to get you to Piliplok. Your commitment to us is insincere. I call that treachery."

"When I hired on with you, I had nothing else in mind but to travel with your troupe wherever you went. But things have changed, and now I see reason to make the pilgrimage."

"Why did you allow things to change? Where’s your sense of duty to your employers and teachers?"

"Did I hire on with you for life?" Valentine demanded. "Is it treachery to discover that one has a goal more important than tomorrow’s performance?"

"That diversion of energy," said Zalzan Kavol, "is what leads me to be rid of you. I want you thinking about juggling every hour of the day, and not about the departure date of pilgrim-ships from Shkunibor Pier."

"There would be no diversion of energy. When I juggle, I juggle. And I’d resign from the troupe when we approached Piliplok. But until then—"

"Enough," Zalzan Kavol said. "Pack. Go. Take yourself swiftly to Piliplok and sail to the Isle, and may you fare well. I have no further need of you."

The Skandar seemed altogether serious. Scowling in the purple mist, slapping at the soggy patches in his pelt, Zalzan Kavol swung heavily around and began to walk away. Valentine trembled in tension and dismay. The thought of leaving now, of traveling alone to Piliplok, left him aghast; and beyond that he felt part of this troupe, more so than he had ever been aware, a member of a close-knit team, and would not willingly be sundered. At least not now, not yet, while he could remain with Carabella and Sleet and even the Skandars, whom he respected without liking, and continue to increase his skills of eye and hand while moving eastward toward whatever strange destiny Deliamber seemed to have in mind for him.

"Wait!" Valentine called. "What about the law?"

Zalzan Kavol glared over his shoulder. "Which law?"

"The one requiring you to keep three human jugglers in your employ," said Valentine.

"I will hire the herdsman boy in your place," Zalzan Kavol retorted, "and teach him whatever skills he can learn." And he stalked off.

Valentine stood stunned. His conversation with Zalzan Kavol had taken place in a grove of small golden-leafed plants that evidently were psychosensitive for, he noticed now, the plants had folded their intricate compound leaflets in the course of the quarrel, and looked shriveled and blackened for ten feet on all sides of him. He touched one. It was crisp and lifeless, as though it had been torched. He felt abashed at being a party to such destruction.

"What happened?" Shanamir asked, appearing suddenly and staring in wonder at the withered foliage. "I heard yelling. The Skandar—"

"Has fired me," said Valentine vacantly, "because I asked him which way we were going next, because I admitted to him that I intended eventually to journey on pilgrimage to the Isle and wondered if his route would suit my purpose."

Shanamir gaped. "You are to make the pilgrimage? I never knew!"

"A recent decision."

"Why, then," the boy cried, "we’ll make it together, won’t we? Come, we’ll pack our things, we’ll steal a couple of mounts from these Skandars, we’ll leave at once!"

"Do you mean that?"

"Of course!"

"It’s thousands of miles to Piliplok. You and I, and no one to guide us, and—"

"Why not?" Shanamir asked. "Look, we ride to Khyntor, and there we take a riverboat to Ni-moya, and on from there down the Zimr to the coast, and at Piliplok we buy passage on the pilgrim-ship, and — what’s wrong, Valentine?"

"I belong with these people. I’m learning an art from them. I— I—" Valentine broke off in confusion. Was he a juggler-in-training, or a Coronal-in-exile? Was it his purpose to plod along with shaggy Skandars, yes, with Carabella and Sleet also, or was it incumbent on him to move by the fastest means toward the Isle, and then with the Lady’s help toward Castle Mount? He was confounded by these uncertainties.

"The cost?" Shanamir said. "Is that what worries you? You had fifty royals and more in Pidruid. You must have some of that left. I have a few crowns myself. If we need more, you can work as a juggler on the riverboat, and I could curry mounts, I suppose, or—"

"Where are you planning to go?" said Carabella, coming abruptly upon them out of the forest. "And what has happened to these sensitives here? Is there trouble?"

Briefly Valentine told her of his talk with Zalzan Kavol.

She listened in silence, with her hand to her lips; and, when he was done, she darted off abruptly, without a word, in the direction Zalzan Kavol had taken.

"Carabella?" Valentine called. But already she was out of sight.

"Let’s go," said Shanamir. "We can be out of here in half an hour, and by nightfall we’ll be miles away. Look, you pack our things. I’ll take two of the mounts and lead them around through the woods, down the slope toward the little lake we passed when we came in, and you meet me down there by the grove of cabbage trees." Shanamir waved his hands impatiently. "Hurry! I’ve got to get the mounts while the Skandars aren’t around, and they might come back at any minute!"

Shanamir vanished into the forest. Valentine stood frozen. To leave now, so suddenly, with so little time to prepare himself for this upheaval? And what of Carabella? Not even a goodbye? Deliamber? Sleet? He started toward the wagon to gather his few possessions, halted, plucked indecisively at the dead leaves of the poor sensitive plants, as though by pruning the withered stalks he could instantly induce new growth. Gradually he compelled himself to see the brighter side. This was a disguised blessing. If he stayed with the jugglers, it would delay by months or even years the confrontation with reality that obviously lay in store for him. And Carabella, if any truth lay in the shape of things that began to emerge, could be no part of that reality, anyway. So, then, it behooved him to shrug away his shock and distress, and take to the highway, bound for Piliplok and the pilgrim-ships. Come, he told himself, get moving, collect your things. Shanamir’s waiting by the cabbage trees with the mounts. But he could not move.

And then Carabella came bounding toward him, face aglow.

"It’s all fixed," she said. "I got Deliamber to work on him. You know, a little trick here and there, a bit of a touch with the tip of a tentacle — the usual wizardry. He’s changed his mind. Or we’ve changed it for him."

Valentine was startled by the intensity of his feeling of relief. "I can stay?"

"If you’ll go to him and ask forgiveness."

"Forgiveness for what?"

Carabella grinned. "That doesn’t matter. He took offense, the Divine only knows why! His fur was wet. His nose was cold. Who knows? He’s a Skandar, Valentine, he has his own weird sense of what’s right and wrong, he’s not required to think the way humans do. You got him angry and he discharged you. Ask him politely to take you back, and he will. Go on, now. Go."

"But— but— "

"But what? Are you going to stand on pride now? Do you want to be rehired or don’t you?"

"Of course I do."

"Then go," Carabella said. She seized him by the arm and gave a little tug, to budge him as he stood there faltering and fumbling, and as she did so it must have occurred to her whose arm it was she was tugging, for she sucked in her breath and let go of him and moved away, hovering as if on the verge of kneeling and making the starburst symbol. "Please?" she said softly. "Please go to him, Valentine? Before he changes his mind again? If you leave the troupe, I’ll have to leave it too, and I don’t want to. Go. Please."

"Yes," said Valentine. She led him over the spongy mist-moistened ground to the wagon. Zalzan Kavol sat sulkily on the steps, huddling in a cloak in the damp, close warmth of the purple mist. Valentine approached him and said straightforwardly, "It was not my intent to anger you. I ask your pardon."

Zalzan Kavol made a low growling sound, almost below the threshold of audibility.

"You are a nuisance," the Skandar said. "Why am I willing to forgive you? From now on you will not speak to me unless I have spoken to you first. Understood?"

"Understood, yes."

"You will make no attempt to influence the route we travel."

"Understood," said Valentine.

"If you irritate me again, you will be terminated without severance pay and you will have ten minutes to get out of my sight, no matter where we are, even if we are camped in the midst of a Metamorph reservation and nightfall is coming, do you understand?"

"I understand," Valentine said.

He waited, wondering if he would be asked to bow, to kiss the Skandar’s hairy fingers, to grovel in obeisance. Carabella, standing to one side, seemed to be holding her breath, as though expecting some explosion to come from the spectacle of a Power of Majipoor begging forgiveness from an itinerant Skandar juggler.

Zalzan Kavol regarded Valentine disdainfully, as he might have regarded a cold fish of uncertain vintage presented to him in a congealed sauce for dinner. Acidulously he said, "I am not required to provide my employees with information of no concern to them. But I will tell you, anyway, that Piliplok is my native city, and I return there from time to time, and it is my purpose to arrive there eventually. How soon it will be depends on what engagements I can arrange between here and there; but be informed that our route lies generally eastward, although there may be some departures from that path, for we have a livelihood to earn. I hope this pleases you. When we reach Piliplok, you may resign from the troupe if you still have it in mind to undergo the pilgrimage, but if you induce any members of the troupe other than the herdsman boy to accompany you on that voyage, I will ask an injunction against it in the Coronal’s Court, and prosecute you to the fullest. Understood?"

"Understood," said Valentine, though he wondered whether he would deal honorably with the Skandar on this point.

"Lastly," said Zalzan Kavol, "I ask you to remember that you are paid a good many crowns a week, plus expenses and bonuses, to perform in this troupe. If I detect you filling your mind with thoughts of the pilgrimage, or of the Lady and her servants, or of anything else but how to throw things into the air and catch them in a theatrically suitable manner, I’ll revoke your employment. In these last few days you’ve already seemed unacceptably moody, Valentine. Change your ways. I need three humans for this troupe, but not necessarily the ones I have now. Understood?"

"Understood," Valentine said.

"Go, then."

Carabella said, as they walked away, "Was that terribly unpleasant for you?"

"It must have been terribly pleasant for Zalzan Kavol."

"He’s just a hairy animal!"

"No," said Valentine gravely. "He’s a sentient being equal to ourselves in civil rank, and never speak of him as anything else. He only looks like an animal," Valentine laughed, and after a moment Carabella laughed with him, a trifle edgily. He said, "In dealing with people who are enormously touchy on matters of honor and pride, I think it’s wisest to be accommodating to their needs, especially if they’re eight feet tall and provide you with your wages. At this point I need Zalzan Kavol far more than he needs me."

"And the pilgrimage?" she asked. "Are you really planning to undergo it? When did you decide that?"

"In Dulorn. After conversation with Deliamber. There are questions about myself I must answer, and if anyone can help me with those answers, it’s the Lady of the Isle. So I’ll go to her, or try to. But all that’s far in the future, and I’ve sworn to Zalzan Kavol not to think of such things." He took her hand in his. "I thank you, Carabella, for repairing matters between Zalzan Kavol and me. I wasn’t at all ready to be discharged from the troupe. Or to lose you so soon after I had found you."

"Why do you think you would have lost me," she asked, "if the Skandar had insisted on letting you go?"

He smiled. "I thank you for that, too. And now I should go down to the cabbage-tree grove, and tell Shanamir to return the mounts that he’s stolen for us."

—4—

IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS the landscape began to grow surpassingly strange, and Valentine had more cause for gladness that he and Shanamir had not tried to proceed by themselves.

The district between Dulorn and the next major city, Mazadone, was relatively thinly populated. Much of it, according to Deliamber, was a royal forest preserve. That bothered Zalzan Kavol, for jugglers would not find employment in forest preserves, nor, for that matter, in low-lying swampy farmland occupied mainly by rice paddies and lusavender-seed plantations; but there was no choice but to follow the main forest highway, since nothing more promising lay to the north or south. On they went, in generally humid and drizzly weather, through a region of villages and farms and occasional thick stands of the fat-trunked comical cabbage trees, short and squat, with massive white fruits sprouting directly from their bark. But as Mazadone Forest Preserve drew closer, the cabbage trees gave way to dense thickets of singing ferns, yellow-fronded and glassy of texture, that emitted piercing discordant sounds whenever they were approached, shrill high-pitched bings and twangs and bleeps, nasty screeches and scrapes. That would not have been so bad — the unmelodious song of the ferns had a certain raucous charm, Valentine thought — but the fern thickets were inhabited by bothersome small creatures far more disagreeable than the plants, little toothy winged rodents known as dhiirns, that came flapping up out of hiding every time the proximity of the wagon touched off the fern-song. The dhiims were about the length and breadth of a small finger, and were covered by fine golden fur; they arose in such numbers that they clouded the air, and swarmed about indignantly, sometimes nipping with their tiny but effective incisors. The thickly furred Skandars up front in the driver’s seat largely ignored them, merely swatting at them when they clustered too close, but the usually stolid mounts were bothered, and balked in the traces several times. Shanamir, sent out to placate the animals, suffered half a dozen painful bites; and as he scurried back into the wagon a good many dhiims entered with him. Sleet took a frightening nip on his cheek near his left eye, and Valentine, beset by dozens of infuriated creatures at once, was bitten on both arms. Carabella methodically destroyed the dhiims with a stiletto used in the juggling act, skewering them with single-minded determination and great skill, but it was an ugly half hour before the last of them was dead.

Beyond the territory of the dhiims and the singing ferns, the travelers entered into a region of curious appearance, a broad open area of meadows out of which rose hundreds of black granite needles just a few feet wide and perhaps eighty feet high, natural obelisks left behind by some unfathomable geological event. To Valentine it was a region of delicate beauty; to Zalzan Kavol it was merely one more place to pass quickly through, en route to the next festival where jugglers might be hired; but to Autifon Deliamber it seemed something else, a place giving sign of possible menace. The Vroon leaned forward, staring keenly for a long moment through the wagon’s window at the obelisks. "Wait," he called finally to Zalzan Kavol.

"What is it?"

"I want to check something. Let me out."

Zalzan Kavol grunted impatiently and tugged on the reins. Deliamber scrambled from the wagon, moving in his supple ropy-limbed Vroonish glide toward the odd rock formations, disappearing among them, coming occasionally into view as he zigzagged from one thin pinnacle to the next.

When he returned, Deliamber looked glum and apprehensive.

"See there," he said, pointing. "Do you make out vines far up, stretched from that rock to that, and from that to that, and on over to there? And some small animals crawling about on the vines?"

Valentine could just barely discern a network of slender glossy red lines high on the pinnacles, forty or fifty feet or more above the ground. And yes, half a dozen slim apelike beasts moving from obelisk to obelisk like acrobats, swinging freely by hands and feet.

"It looks like birdnet vine," said Zalzan Kavol in a puzzled tone.

"It is," Deliamber said.

"But why do they not stick to it? What are those animals, anyway?"

"Forest-brethren," the Vroon answered. "Do you know of them?"

"Tell me."

"They are troublesome. A wild tribe, native to central Zimroel, not usually found this far west. The Metamorphs are known to hunt them for food or perhaps for sport, I’m not sure which. They have intelligence, though of a low order, something greater than dogs or droles, less than civilized folk. Their gods are dwikka-trees; they have some sort of tribal structure; they know how to use poisoned darts, and cause problems for wayfarers. Their sweat contains an enzyme that makes them immune to the stickiness of birdnet vine, which they employ for many purposes."

"If they annoy us," Zalzan Kavol declared, "we will destroy them. Onward!"

Once past the region of the obelisks they saw no further traces of forest-brethren that day. But on the next, Deliamber once again spied ribbons of birdnet vine in the treetops, and a day after that the travelers, now deep in the forest preserve, came upon a grove of trees of truly colossal mass, which, the Vroonish wizard said, were dwikkas, sacred to the forest-brethren. "This explains their presence so far from Metamorph territory," said Deliamber. "These must be a migrating band, come west to pay homage in this forest."

The dwikkas were awesome. There were five of them, set far apart in otherwise empty fields. Their trunks, covered with bright red bark that grew in distinct plates with deep fissures between, were greater in diameter than the long axis of Zalzan Kavol’s wagon; and though they were not particularly tall, no higher than a hundred feet or so, their mighty limbs, each as thick as the trunk of an ordinary tree, spread out to such a distance that whole legions might take shelter under the dwikka’s gigantic canopy. On stalks as thick as a Skandar’s thigh sprouted the leaves, great leathery black things the size of a house, that drooped heavily, casting an impenetrable shade. And from each branch hung suspended two or three elephantine yellowish fruits, bumpy irregular globes a good twelve or fifteen feet in width. One of them had recently fallen, it appeared, from the nearest tree, perhaps on a rainy day when the ground was soft, for its weight had dug a shallow crater in which it lay, split apart, revealing large glistening many-angled black seeds in the mass of scarlet pulp.

Valentine could understand why these trees were gods to the forest-brethren. They were vegetable monarchs, imperious, commanding. He was quite willing to sink to his knees before them himself.

Deliamber said, "The fruit is tasty. Intoxicating, in fact, to the human metabolism and to some others."

"To Skandars?" asked Zalzan Kavol.

"To Skandars, yes."

Zalzan Kavol laughed. "We’ll try it. Erfon! Thelkar! Gather pieces of the fruit for us!"

Nervously Deliamber said, "The talismans of the forest-brethren are embedded in the ground before each tree. They’ve been here recently, and might return, and if they find us desecrating the grove they will attack, and their darts can kill."

"Sleet, Carabella, stand guard to the left. Valentine, Shanamir, Vinorkis, over there. Cry out if you see even one of the little apes." Zalzan Kavol gestured at his brothers. "Collect the fruit for us," he ordered. "Haern, you and I will defend the situation from here. Wizard, remain with us." Zalzan Kavol took two energy-throwers from a rack and gave one to his brother Haern.

Deliamber clucked and muttered in disapproval. "They move like ghosts, they come out of nowhere—"

"Enough," said Zalzan Kavol.

Valentine took up a lookout position fifty yards ahead of the wagon, and peered warily beyond the last of the dwikka-trees into the dark, mysterious forest. He expected to have a fatal dart come winging toward him at any moment. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Erfon Kavol and Thelkar, carrying a big wicker basket between them, made their way toward the fallen fruit, pausing every few steps to look in all directions. When they reached it, they began cautiously to edge around to the far side of it.

"What if a bunch of forest-brethren are sitting behind that thing right now," Shanamir asked, "having a little feast? Suppose Thelkar stumbles over them and—"

A tremendous and terrifying whoop and a roar, such as might come from an outraged bull-bidlak interrupted in its mating, erupted from the vicinity of the dwikka-fruit. Erfon Kavol, looking panic-stricken, came galloping back into view and rushed toward the wagon, followed a moment later by an equally daunted Thelkar.

"Beasts!" cried a ferocious voice. "Pigs and fathers of pigs! Rape a woman enjoying her lunch, will you? I’ll teach you to rape! I’ll fix you so you’ll never rape again! Stand your ground, hairy animals! Stand, I say, stand!"

Out from behind the dwikka-fruit came the largest human woman Valentine had ever seen, a creature so vast she was a proper companion to these trees, and seemed perfectly in scale with them. She stood close to seven feet tall, perhaps more, and her gigantic body was a mountain of flesh rising on legs as sturdy as pillars. A close-fitting shirt and gray leather trousers were her garments, and the shirt was open nearly to the waist, revealing huge jouncing globes of breasts the size of a man’s head. Her hair was a mop of wild orange curls; her blazing eyes were pale piercing blue. She carried a vibration-sword of imposing length, which she swung about her with such force that Valentine, a hundred feet away, could feel the breeze it stirred. Her cheeks and breasts were smeared with the scarlet juice of the dwikka-fruit’s meat.

In weighty strides she thundered toward the wagon, crying rape and demanding vengeance.

"What is this?" Zalzan Kavol asked, looking as bemused as Valentine had ever seen him. He glared at his brothers. "What did you do to her?"

"We never touched her," said Erfon Kavol. "We were looking for forest-brethren back there, and Thelkar came upon her unexpectedly, and stumbled, and caught her arm to steady himself—"

"You said you never touched her," Zalzan Kavol snapped.

"Not that way. It was only an accident, a stumble."

"Do something," Zalzan Kavol said hastily to Deliamber, for the giant woman was almost upon them now.

The Vroon, looking pale and cheerless, stepped in front of the wagon and lifted many tentacles toward the apparition that towered, almost Skandar-high, above him.

"Peace," Deliamber said mildly to the onrushing giantess. "We mean you no harm." As he spoke he gestured with manic purposefulness, casting some sort of pacifying spell that manifested itself as a faint bluish glow in the air before him. The huge woman appeared to respond to it, for she slowed her advance and managed to come to a halt a few feet from the wagon.

There she stood, sullenly whipping the vibration-sword back and forth at her side. After a moment she pulled her shirt together in front, fastening it inadequately. Glowering at the Skandars, she indicated Erfon and Thelkar and said in a deep booming voice, "What were those two planning to do to me?"

Deliamber replied, "They had simply gone to collect pieces of the dwikka-fruit. See the basket they were carrying?"

"We had no idea you were there," Thelkar murmured. "We walked around behind the fruit to check for hidden forest-brethren, is all."

"And fell upon me like the oaf you are, and would have violated me if I hadn’t been armed, eh?"

"I lost my footing," Thelkar insisted. "There was no intention of molesting you. I was on guard for forest-brethren, and when instead I encountered someone of your size—"

"What? More insults?"

Thelkar took a deep breath. "That is to say — it was unexpected when I— when you—"

Erfon Kavol said, "We had no thought—"

Valentine, who had been observing all of this in gathering amusement, now came over and said, "If they were minded for rape, would they have attempted it in front of so large an audience? We are of your kind here. We wouldn’t have tolerated it." He indicated Carabella. "That woman is as fierce in her way as you are in yours, my lady. Be assured that if these Skandars had tried to do you any injury, she alone would have prevented it. It was a simple misunderstanding, nothing more. Put down your weapon and feel no peril among us."

The giantess looked somewhat soothed by the courtliness and charm of Valentine’s speech. Slowly she lowered the vibration-sword, allowing it to go inert, and fastened it at her hip.

"Who are you?" she asked querulously. "What is all this procession traveling here?"

"My name is Valentine, and we are traveling jugglers, and this Skandar is Zalzan Kavol, the master of our troupe."

"And I am Lisamon Hultin," the giantess responded, "who hires as bodyguard and warrior, though there’s been little of that lately."

"And we are wasting time," said Zalzan Kavol, "and should be on our way, if we are properly forgiven for having intruded on your repose."

Lisamon Hultin nodded brusquely. "Yes, be on your way. But are you aware this is dangerous territory?"

"Forest-brethren?" Valentine asked.

"All over the place. The woods are thick with them, just ahead."

"And yet you feel no fear of them?" Deliamber remarked.

"I speak their language," Lisamon Hultin said. "I have negotiated a private treaty with them. Do you think I’d dare be munching on dwikka-fruit otherwise? I may be fat but not between the ears, little sorcerer." She stared at Zalzan Kavol. "Where are you bound?"

"Mazadone," replied the Skandar.

"Mazadone? Is there work for you in Mazadone?"

"We hope to learn that," Zalzan Kavol said.

"There’s nothing for you there. I come from Mazadone just now. The duke is lately dead and three weeks of mourning have been decreed in the entire province. Or do you jugglers perform at funerals?"

Zalzan Kavol’s face darkened. "No work in Mazadone? No work in the whole province? We have expenses to meet! We have already gone unpaid since Dulorn! What will we do?"

Lisamon Hultin spat out a chunk of dwikka-fruit pulp. "That’s no sorrow of mine. Anyway, you can’t get to Mazadone."

"What?"

"Forest-brethren. They’ve blocked the road a few miles ahead. Asking tribute of wayfarers, I think, something absurd like that. They won’t let you through. Lucky if they don’t fill you with their darts."

"They’ll let us through!" Zalzan Kavol exclaimed.

The warrior-woman shrugged. "Not without me, they won’t."

"You?"

"I told you, I speak their language. I can buy you a way through, with a little haggling. Are you interested? Five royals ought to do it."

"What use do forest-brethren have for money?" the Skandar asked.

"Oh, not for them," she said airily. "Five for me. I’ll offer other things to them. Deal?"

"Absurd. Five royals is a fortune!"

"I don’t bargain," she said evenly. "There is honor in my profession. Good luck on the road ahead." She favored Thelkar and Erfon Kavol with a frigid stare. "If you wish, you may have some of the dwikka-fruit before you go. But better not be munching on it when you meet the brethren!"

She turned with massive dignity and walked to the great fruit beneath the tree. Drawing her sword, she hacked off three large chunks and shoved them disdainfully toward the two Skandars, who somewhat uneasily nudged them into the wicker basket.

Zalzan Kavol said, "Into the wagon, all of you! We have a long way to Mazadone!"

"You won’t travel far today," said Lisamon Hultin, and released a gale of derisive laughter. "You’ll be back here soon enough — if you survive!"

—5—

THE POISONED DARTS of the forest-brethren preoccupied Valentine for the next few miles. Sudden horrible death held no appeal for him, and the woods here were thick and mysterious, with vegetation of a primordial sort, fern-trees with silvery spore-sheaths and glassy-textured horsetails a dozen feet high and thickets of bunch-fungus, pale and pocked with brown craters. In a place of such strangeness anything might happen, and probably would.

But the juice of the dwikka-fruit eased tensions mightily. Vinorkis sliced up one huge chunk and passed cubes of it around: it was piercingly sweet of flavor and granular in texture, dissolving quickly against the tongue, and whatever alkaloids it contained went swiftly through the blood to the brain, faster than the strongest wine. Valentine felt warm and cheerful. He slouched back in the passenger cabin, one arm around Carabella, the other around Shanamir. Up front, Zalzan Kavol evidently was more relaxed as well, for he stepped up the pace of the wagon, pushing it to a rollicking speed not much in keeping with his dour, cautious practices. The usually self-contained Sleet, slicing up more dwikka-fruit, began to sing a rowdy song:

The wagon pulled suddenly to a halt, so suddenly that Sleet lurched forward and came close to falling into Valentine’s lap, and a slab of soft wet dwikka-fruit smacked into Valentine’s face. Laughing and blinking, he wiped himself clean. When he could see again, he found that everyone was gathered at the front of the wagon, peering out between the Skandgrs on the driver’s seat.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Birdnet vine," said Vinorkis, sounding quite sober. "Blocking the road. The giantess told the truth."

Indeed. The sticky, tough red vine had been laced from fern-tree to fern-tree at a dozen angles, forming a sturdy and resilient chain both broad and thick. The forest flanking the road was altogether impenetrable here; the birdnet vine sealed the highway. There was no way the wagon could proceed.

"How hard is it to cut?" Valentine asked. Zalzan Kavol said, "We could do it in five minutes with energy-throwers. But look there."

"Forest-brethren," Carabella said softly. They were everywhere, swarming in the woods, hanging from every tree although getting no closer to the wagon than a hundred yards or so. They seemed less like apes at close range, more like savages of an intelligent species. They were small, naked beings with smooth blue-gray skin and thin limbs. Their hairless heads were narrow and long, with sloping flat foreheads, and their elongated necks were flimsy and fragile. Their chests were shallow, their frames meatless and bony. All of them, both men and women, wore dart-blowers of reeds strapped to their hips. They pointed at the wagon, chattered to one another, made little hissing whistling sounds.

"What do we do?" Zalzan Kavol asked Deliamber.

"Hire the warrior-woman, I would think."

"Never!"

"In that case," said the Vroon, "let us prepare to camp in the wagon until the end of our days, or else go back toward Dulorn and find some other road to travel."

"We could parley with them," the Skandar said. "Go out there, wizard. Speak to them in dream-language, monkey-language, Vroon-language, any words that will work. Tell them we have urgent business in Mazadone, that we must perform at the funeral of the duke, and they will be severely punished if they delay us."

Deliamber said calmly to Zalzan Kavol, "You tell them."

"I?"

"Whichever of us steps out of the wagon first is apt to be skewered by their darts. I prefer to yield the honor. Perhaps they will be intimidated by your great size and hail you as their king. Or perhaps not."

Zalzan Kavol’s eyes blazed. "You refuse?"

"A dead sorcerer," Deliamber said, "will not guide you very far on this planet. I know something of these creatures. They are unpredictable and very dangerous. Pick another messenger, Zalzan Kavol. Our contract doesn’t require me to risk my life for you."

Zalzan Kavol made his growling sound of displeasure, but he let the issue drop.

Stymied, they sat tight for long minutes. The forest-brethren began to descend from the trees, remaining at a considerable distance from the wagon. Some of them danced and cavorted now in the roadway, setting up a ragged, tuneless chanting, formless and atonal, like the droning of huge insects.

Erfon Kavol said, "A blast from the energy-thrower would scatter them. It wouldn’t take long for us to incinerate the birdnet vine. And then—"

"And then they’d follow us through the forest, pumping darts at us whenever we showed our faces," said Zalzan Kavol. "No. There may be thousands of them all around us. They see us: we can’t see them. We can’t hope to win by using force against them." Moodily the big Skandar wolfed down the last of the dwikka-fruit. Again he sat in silence for a few moments, scowling, occasionally shaking fists at the tiny folk blocking the path. At length he said in a bitter rumble, "Mazadone is still some days’ journey away, and that woman said there was no work to be had there anyway, so we’ll have to go on to Borgax or maybe even Thagobar, eh, Deliamber? Weeks more before we earn another crown. And here we sit, trapped in the forest by little apes with poisoned darts. Valentine?"

Startled, Valentine said, "Yes?"

"I want you to slip out of the wagon the back way and return to that warrior-woman. Offer her three royals to get us out of this."

"Are you serious?" Valentine asked.

Carabella, with a little gasp, said, "No! I’ll go instead!"

"What’s this?" said Zalzan Kavol in irritation.

"Valentine is— he is— he gets lost easily, he becomes distracted, he— he might not be able to find—"

"Foolishness," the Skandar said, waving his hands impatiently. "The road is straight. Valentine is strong and quick. And this is dangerous work. You have skills too valuable to risk, Carabella. Valentine will have to go."

"Don’t do it," Shanamir whispered.

Valentine hesitated. He had not much liking for the idea of leaving the relative safety of the wagon to travel on foot alone in a forest infested with deadly creatures. But someone had to do it, and not one of the slow, ponderous Skandars, nor the splay-footed Hjort. To Zalzan Kavol he was the most expendable member of the troupe; perhaps he was. Perhaps he was expendable even to himself.

He said, "The warrior-woman told us her price was five royals."

"Offer her three."

"And if she refuses? She said it was against her honor to bargain."

"Three," Zalzan Kavol said. "Five royals is an immense fortune. Three is an absurd enough price to pay."

"You want me to run miles through a dangerous forest to offer someone an inadequate price for a job that absolutely must be done?"

"Are you refusing?"

"Pointing out folly," said Valentine. "If I’m to risk my life, there must be the hope of achievement. Give me five royals for her."

"Bring her back here," the Skandar said, "and I’ll negotiate with her."

"Bring her back yourself," said Valentine.

Zalzan Kavol considered that. Carabella, tense and pale, sat shaking her head. Sleet warned Valentine with his eyes to hold his position. Shanamir, red-faced, trembling, seemed about ready to burst forth with anger. Valentine wondered if this time he had pushed the Skandar’s always volatile temper too far.

Zalzan Kavol’s fur stirred as though spasms of rage were contorting his powerful muscles. He seemed to be holding himself in check by furious effort. Doubtless Valentine’s latest show of independence had enraged him almost to the boiling point; but there was a glint of calculation in the Skandar’s eyes, as though he were weighing the impact of Valentine’s open defiance against the need he had for Valentine to do this service. Perhaps he was even asking himself whether his thrift might be foolishness here.

After a long tense pause Zalzan Kavol let out his breath in an explosive hiss and, scowling, reached for his purse. Sourly he counted out the five gleaming one-royal pieces.

"Here," he grunted. "And hurry."

"I’ll go as fast as I can."

"If running is too great a burden," said Zalzan Kavol, "go out the front way, and ask the forest-brethren if you may have leave to unhitch one of our mounts, and ride back to her in comfort. But do it quickly, whichever you choose."

"I’ll run," Valentine replied, and began to unfasten the wagon’s rear window.

His shoulder blades itched in anticipation of the thwock of a dart between them the moment he emerged. But no thwocks came, and soon he was running lightly and easily down the road. The forest that had looked so sinister from the wagon looked much less so now, the vegetation unfamiliar but hardly ominous, not even the pock-marked bunch-fungus, and the fern-trees seemed nothing but elegant as their spore-sheaths glistened in the afternoon sun. His long legs moved in steady rhythm, and his heart pumped uncomplainingly. The running was relaxing, almost hypnotic, as soothing to him as juggling.

He ran a long while, paying no heed to time and distance, until it seemed he surely must have gone far enough. But how could he have run unknowingly past anything so conspicuous as five dwikka-trees? Had he carelessly taken some fork in the road and lost the path? It seemed unlikely. So he simply ran on, and on and on, until eventually the monstrous trees, with the great fallen fruit beneath the closest of them, came into view.

The giantess seemed nowhere around. He called out her name, he peered behind the dwikka-fruit, he made a circuit of the entire grove. No one. In dismay he contemplated running onward, back halfway to Dulorn, maybe, to find her. Now that he had stopped, he felt the effects of his jog: muscles were protesting in his calves and thighs, and his heart was thumping in an unpleasant way. He had no appetite for more running just now.

But then he caught sight of a mount tethered a few hundred yards back of the dwikka-tree grove — an oversize beast, broad-backed and thick-legged, suitable for carrying Lisamon Hultin’s bulk. He went to it, and looked beyond, and saw a roughly hacked trail leading toward running water.

The ground sloped off sharply, and gave way to a jagged cliff. Valentine peered over the edge. A stream emerged from the forest here and tumbled down the face of the cliff to land in a rock basin perhaps forty feet below; and alongside that pool, sunning herself after a bath, was Lisamon Hultin. She lay face down, her vibration-sword close beside her. Valentine looked with awe at her wide muscular shoulders, her powerful arms, the massive columns of her legs, the vast dimpled globes of her buttocks.

He called to her.

She rolled over at once, sat up, looked about her.

"Up here," he said. She glanced in his direction and discreetly he turned his head away, but she only laughed at his modesty. Rising, she reached for her clothing in a casual, unhurried way.

"You," she said. "The gentle-spoken one. Valentine. You can come down here. I’m not afraid of you,"

"I know you dislike being disturbed at your repose," Valentine said mildly, picking his way down the steep rocky path. By the time he had reached the bottom she had her trousers on and was struggling to pull her shirt over her mighty breasts. He said, "We came to the roadblock."

"Of course."

"We need to get on to Mazadone. The Skandar has sent me to hire you." Valentine produced Zalzan Kavol’s five royals. "Will you help us?"

She eyed the shining coins in his hand.

"The price is seven and a half."

Valentine pursed his lips. "You told us five, before."

"That was before."

"The Skandar has given me only five royals to pay you."

She shrugged and began to unfasten her shirt. "In that case, I’ll continue to sunbathe. You may stay or not, as you wish, but keep your distance."

Quietly Valentine said, "When the Skandar tried to beat down your price, you refused to bargain, telling him that there is honor in your profession. My notion of honor would require me to abide by a price once I quoted it."

She put her hands to her hips and laughed, a laugh so vociferous he thought it would blow him away. He felt like a plaything beside her: she outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, and stood at least a head taller. She said, "How brave you are, or how stupid! I could destroy you with a slap of my hand, and you stand here lecturing me about faults of honor!"

"I think you wouldn’t harm me."

She studied him with new interest. "Perhaps not. But you take risks, fellow. I offend easily and I do more damage than I intend, sometimes, when I lose my temper."

"Be that as it may. We have to get to Mazadone, and only you can call off the forest-brethren. The Skandar will pay five royals and no more." Valentine knelt and put the five brilliant coins in a row on the rock by the pool. "However, I have a little money of my own. If it’ll settle the issue, I’ll add that to the fee." He fished in his purse until he found a royal piece, found another, laid a half-royal beside it, and looked up hopefully.

"Five will be enough," Lisamon Hultin said.

She scooped up Zalzan Kavol’s coins, left Valentine’s, and went scrambling up the path.

"Where’s your mount?" she asked, untethering her own.

"I came on foot."

"On foot? On foot? You ran all that way?" She peered at him. "What a loyal employee you are! Does he pay you well, to give such service and take such risks?"

"Not particularly."

"No, I suppose not. Well, climb on behind me. This beast would never even notice a little extra weight."

She clambered onto the mount, which, though large for its kind, seemed dwarfed and frail once she was on it. Valentine, after some hesitation, got on behind her and clamped his hands around her waist. For all her bulk there was nothing fat about her: solid muscle girdled her hips.

The mount cantered out of the dwikka-tree grove and down the road. The wagon, when they came to it, was still shut up tight, and forest-brethren still danced and chattered in and around the trees behind the blockade.

They dismounted. Lisamon Hultin walked without sign of fear to the front of the wagon and called something to the forest-brethren in a high, shrill voice. There was a reply of similar pitch from the trees. Again she called; again she was answered; then a long, feverish colloquy ensued, with many brief expostulations and interjections.

She turned to Valentine. "They will open the gate for you," she said. "For a fee."

"How much?"

"Not money. Services."

"What services can we render for forest-brethren?" She said, "I told them you are jugglers, and I explained what it is that jugglers do. They’ll let you proceed if you’ll perform for them. Otherwise they intend to kill you and make toys of your bones, but not today, for today is a holy day among the forest-brethren and they kill no one on holy days. My advice to you is to perform for them, but do as you wish." She added, "The poison that they use does not act particularly quickly."

—6—

ZALZAN KAVOL WAS INDIGNANT — perform for monkeys? perform without fee? — but Deliamber pointed out that the forest-brethren were somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than monkeys, and Sleet observed that they had not had their practice today and the workout would do them some good, and Erfon Kavol clinched the matter by arguing that it would not really be a free performance, since it was being traded for passage through this part of the forest, which these creatures effectively controlled. And in any case they had no choice in the matter: so out they came, with clubs and balls and sickles, but not the torches, for Deliamber suggested that the torches might frighten the forest-brethren and cause them to do unpredictable things. In the clearest space they could find they began to juggle.

The forest-brethren watched raptly. Hundreds upon hundreds of them trooped from the forest and squatted alongside the road, staring, nibbling their fingers and their slender prehensile tails, making soft chittering comments to one another. The Skandars interchanged sickles and knives and clubs and hatchets, Valentine whirled clubs aloft, Sleet and Carabella performed with elegance and distinction, and an hour went by, and another, and the sun began to slink off in the direction of Pidruid, and still the forest-brethren watched, and still the jugglers juggled, and nothing was done about unwinding the birdnet vine from the trees.

"Do we play for them all night?" Zalzan Kavol demanded.

"Hush," said Deliamber. "Give no offense. Our lives are in their hands."

They used the opportunity to rehearse new routines. The Skandars polished an interception number, stealing throws from one another in a way that was comical in beings so huge and fierce. Valentine worked with Sleet and Carabella on the interchange of clubs. Then Sleet and Valentine threw clubs rapidly at one another while first Carabella and then Shanamir turned handsprings daringly between them. And so it went, on into a third hour. "These forest-brethren have had five royals’ worth of entertainment from us already," Zalzan Kavol grumbled. "When does this end?"

"You juggle very capably," said Lisamon Hultin. "They enjoy your show immensely. I enjoy it myself."

"How pleasant for you," Zalzan Kavol said sourly.

Twilight was approaching. Apparently the coming of darkness signaled some shift in mood for the forest-brethren, for without warning they lost interest in the performance. Five of them, of presence and authority, came forward and set about ripping down the barricade of birdnet vine. Their small sharp-fingered hands dealt easily with the stuff, that would have tangled anyone else hopelessly in snarls of sticky fiber. In a few minutes the way was clear, and the forest-brethren, chattering, faded into the darkness of the woods.

"Have you wine?" Lisamon Hultin asked, as the jugglers gathered their gear and prepared to move along. "All this watching has given me a powerful thirst."

Zalzan Kavol began to say something miserly about supplies running low, but too late: Carabella, with a sharp glare at her employer, produced a flask. The warrior-woman tipped it back, draining it in one long lusty gulp. She wiped her lips with the sleeve of her shirt and belched.

"Not bad," she said. "Dulornese?" Carabella nodded.

"Those Ghayrogs know how to drink, snakes that they are! You won’t find anything like it in Mazadone."

Zalzan Kavol said, "Three weeks of mourning, you say?"

"No less. All public amusements forbidden. Yellow mourning-stripes on every door."

"Of what did the duke die?" Sleet asked.

The giantess shrugged. "Some say it was a sending from the King, that frightened him to death, and others that he choked on a gobbet of half-cooked meat, and still others that he indulged in an excess with three of his concubines. Does it matter? He’s dead, that’s not to be disputed, and the rest is trifles."

"And no work to be had," said Zalzan Kavol gloomily.

"No, nothing as far as Thagobar and beyond."

"Weeks without earnings," the Skandar muttered.

Lisamon Hultin said, "It must be unfortunate for you. But I know where you could find good wages just beyond Thagobar."

"Yes," Zalzan Kavol said. "In Khyntor, I suppose."

"Khyntor? No, times are lean there, I hear. A poor harvest of clennet-puffs this summer, and the merchants have tightened credit, and I think there’s little money to be spent on entertainments. No, I speak of Ilirivoyne."

"What?" Sleet cried, as though he had been struck by a dart.

Valentine sorted through his knowledge, came up with nothing, and whispered to Carabella, "Where’s that?"

"Southeast of Khyntor."

"But southeast of Khyntor is the Metamorph territory."

"Exactly."

Zalzan Kavol’s heavy features took on an animated cast for the first time since encountering the roadblock. He swung round and said, "What work is there for us in Ilirivoyne?"

"The Shapeshifters hold festival there next month," Lisamon Hultin replied. "There’ll be harvest-dancing and contests of many kinds and merrymaking. I’ve heard that sometimes troupes from the imperial provinces enter the reservation and earn huge sums at festival time. The Shapeshifters regard imperial money lightly and are quick to dispose of it."

"Indeed," Zalzan Kavol said. The chilly light of greed played across his face. "I had heard the same thing, long ago. But it never occurred to me to test its truth."

"You’ll test it without me!" Sleet cried suddenly.

The Skandar glanced at him. "Eh?"

Sleet showed intense strain, as though he had been doing his blind-juggling routine all afternoon. His lips were taut and bloodless, his eyes were fixed and unnaturally bright. "If you go to Ilirivoyne," he said tensely, "I will not accompany you."

"I remind you of our contract," said Zalzan Kavol.

"Nevertheless. Nothing in it obliges me to follow you into Metamorph territory. Imperial law is not valid there, and our contract lapses the moment we enter the reservation. I have no love for the Shapeshifters and refuse to risk my life and soul in their province."

"We’ll talk about this later, Sleet."

"My response will be the same later."

Zalzan Kavol looked about the circle. "Enough of this. We’ve lost hours here. I thank you for your help," he said without warmth to Lisamon Hultin.

"I wish you a profitable journey," she said, and rode off into the forest.

Because they had consumed so much time at the roadblock, Zalzan Kavol chose to keep the wagon moving through the night, contrary to his usual practice. Valentine, exhausted by a lengthy run and hours of juggling, and feeling some lingering haziness from the dwikka-fruit he had eaten, fell asleep sitting up in the back of the wagon and knew nothing more until morning. The last he heard was a forceful discussion of the notion of venturing into Metamorph territory: Deliamber suggesting that the perils of Ilirivoyne had been exaggerated by rumor, Carabella noting that Zalzan Kavol would be justified in prosecuting Sleet, and expensively, if he broke his contract, and Sleet insisting with almost hysterical conviction that he dreaded the Metamorphs and would not go within a thousand miles of them. Shanamir and Vinorkis, too, expressed fear of the Shapeshifters, who they said were sullen, tricky, and dangerous.

Valentine woke to find his head nestled cozily in Carabella’s lap. Bright sunlight streamed into the wagon. They were camped in some broad and pleasant park, a place of sweeping blue-gray lawns and narrow sharp-angled trees of great height. Low rounded hills surrounded everything. "Where are we?" he asked.

"Outskirts of Mazadone. The Skandar drove like a madman all night long." Carabella laughed prettily. "And you slept like one who has been dead a long time."

Outside, Zalzan Kavol and Sleet were engaged in heated argument a few yards from the wagon. The small white-haired man seemed half again his normal size with rage. He paced back and forth, pounded fist into palm, shouted, scuffed at the ground, once seemed at the verge of launching a physical attack on the Skandar, who seemed, for Zalzan Kavol, remarkably calm and forbearing. He stood with all his arms folded, looming high over Sleet and making only an occasional quiet cold reply to his outbursts.

Carabella turned to Deliamber. "This has continued long enough. Wizard, can you intervene, before Sleet says something really rash?"

The Vroon looked melancholy. "Sleet has a terror of the Metamorphs that goes beyond all reason. Perhaps it’s connected with that sending of the King that he had, long ago in Narabal, that turned his hair white in a single evening. Or perhaps not. In any case, it may be wisest for him to withdraw from the troupe, whatever the consequences."

"But we need him!"

"And if he thinks terrible things will befall him in Ilirivoyne? Can we ask him to subject himself to such fears?"

"Perhaps I can calm him," Valentine said.

He rose to go outside, but at that instant Sleet, face dark and set, stormed into the wagon. Without a word the compact little juggler began to stuff his few possessions into a pack; then he swept out, his fury unabated, and striding past the motionless Zalzan Kavol, began to march at a startling clip toward the low hills to the north.

Helplessly they watched him. No one made a move to pursue until Sleet was nearly out of sight. Then Carabella said, "I’ll go after him. I can get him to change his mind."

She ran off toward the hills.

Zalzan Kavol called to her as she went past him, but she ignored him. The Skandar, shaking his head, summoned the others from the wagon.

"Where is she going?" he asked.

"To try to bring Sleet back," said Valentine.

"Hopeless. Sleet has chosen to leave the troupe. I’ll see to it that he regrets his defection. Valentine, greater responsibilities now will fall upon you, and I’ll add five crowns a week to your salary. Is this acceptable?"

Valentine nodded. He thought of Sleet’s quiet, steady presence in the troupe, and felt a pang of loss.

The Skandar continued, "Deliamber, I have, as you might suspect, decided to seek work for us among the Metamorphs. Are you familiar with the routes of Ilirivoyne?"

"I have never been there," the Vroon answered. "But I know where it is."

"And which is the quickest way?"

"To Khyntor from here, I think, and then eastward by riverboat some four hundred miles, and at Verf there’s a road due south into the reservation. Not a smooth road, but wide enough for the wagon, so I believe. I will study it."

"And how long will it take for us to reach Ilirivoyne, then?"

"Perhaps a month, if there are no delays."

"Just in time for the Metamorph festival," said Zalzan Kavol. "Perfect! What delays do you anticipate?"

Deliamber said, "The usual. Natural disasters, breakdown of the wagon, local disturbances, criminal interferences. Things are not as orderly in mid-continent as they are on the coasts. There are risks involved in traveling in those parts."

"You bet there are!" boomed a familiar voice. "Protection is what you need!"

The formidable presence of Lisamon Hultin suddenly was among them.

She looked rested and relaxed, not at all as though she had ridden all night, nor was her mount particularly spent. In a puzzled voice Zalzan Kavol said, "How did you get here so quickly?"

"Forest trails. I’m big, but not so big as your wagon, and I can take back ways. Going to Ilirivoyne, are you?"

"Yes," said the Skandar.

"Good. I knew you would. And I’ve come after you to offer my services. I’m out of work, you’re going into dangerous parts — it’s a logical partnership. I’ll escort you safely to Ilirivoyne, that I guarantee!"

"Your wages are too high for us."

She grinned. "You think I always get five royals for a little job like that? I charged so much because you made me angry, tromping in on me while I was trying to have a private feed. I’ll get you to Ilirivoyne for another five, no matter how long it takes."

"Three," said Zalzan Kavol sternly.

"You never learn, do you?" The giantess spat almost at the Skandar’s feet. "I don’t haggle. Get yourselves to Ilirivoyne without me, and good fortune attend you. Though I doubt it will." She winked at Valentine. "Where are the other two?"

"Sleet refused to go to Ilirivoyne. He went roaring out of here ten minutes ago."

"I don’t blame him. And the woman?"

"She went after him, to talk him into returning. Up there." Valentine pointed to the path winding up into the hills.

"There?"

"Between that hill and that."

"Into the mouthplant grove?" There was disbelief in Lisamon Hultin’s voice.

"What is that?" Valentine asked.

Deliamber, at the same moment, said, "Mouthplants? Here?"

"The park is dedicated to them," the giantess declared. "But there are warning signs at the foot of the hills. They went up that trail? On foot? The Divine protect them!"

Exasperated, Zalzan Kavol said, "They can eat him twice, for all I care. But I need her!"

"As do I," said Valentine. To the warrior-woman he said, "Possibly if we rode up there now, we could find them before they enter the mouthplant grove."

"Your master feels he can’t afford my services."

"Five royals?" Zalzan Kavol said. "From here to Ilirivoyne?"

"Six," she said coolly.

"Six, then. But get them back! Get her, at least!"

"Yes," said Lisamon Hultin in disgust. "You people have no sense, but I have no work, so we deserve each other, perhaps. Take one of those mounts," she said to Valentine, "and follow me."

"You want him to go?" Zalzan Kavol wailed. "I’ll have no humans at all in my troupe!"

"I’ll bring him back," the giantess said. "And, with luck, the other two also." She clambered onto her mount. "Come," she said.

—7—

THE PATH INTO THE HILLS was gently sloping, and the blue-gray grass looked soft as velvet. It was hard to believe that anything menacing dwelled in this lovely park. But as they reached the place where the path began to rise at a sharper angle, Lisamon Hultin grunted and indicated a bare wooden stake set in the ground. Beside it, half hidden by grass, was a fallen sign. Valentine saw only the words

in large red letters. Sleet, in his rage, had not noticed; Carabella, perhaps in her urgent haste, had failed to see the sign also, or else had ignored it.

Quickly now the path climbed, and just as quickly it leveled off on the far side of the hills, in a place that was no longer grassy but densely wooded. Lisamon Hultin, riding just ahead of Valentine, slowed her mount to a walk as they entered a moist and mysterious copse where trees with slender, strong-ribbed trunks grew at wide intervals, shooting up like beanstalks to create a thickly interlaced canopy far overhead.

"See, there, the first mouthplants," the giantess said. "Filthy things! If I had the keeping of this planet, I’d put the torch to all of them, but our Coronals tend to be nature-lovers, so it seems, and preserve them in royal parks. Pray that your friends have had the wisdom to stay clear of them!"

On the bare forest floor, in the open spaces between the trees, grew stemless plants of colossal size. Their leaves, four or five inches broad and eight or nine feet in length, sharp-toothed along their sides and metallic of texture, were arranged in loose rosettes. At the center of each gaped a deep cup a foot in diameter, half filled with a noxious-looking greenish fluid, out of which a complex array of stubby organs projected. It seemed to Valentine that there were things like knife-blades in there, and paired grinders that could come together nastily, and still other things that might have been delicate flowers partly submerged.

"These are flesh-eating plants," Lisamon Hultin said. "The forest floor is underlain by their hunting tendrils, which sense the presence of small animals, capture them, and carry them to the mouth. Observe."

She guided her mount toward the closest of the mouth-plants. When the animal was still at least twenty feet from it, something like a live whip suddenly began to writhe in the decaying forest duff. It broke free of the ground to coil itself with a terrifying snapping sound around the animal’s pastern just above the hoof. The mount, placid as usual, sniffed in puzzlement as the tendril began to exert pressure, trying to pull it toward the gaping mouth in the plant’s central cup.

The warrior-woman, drawing her vibration-sword, leaned down and sliced quickly through the tendril. It snapped back as the tension was released, almost to the cup itself, and at the same time a dozen other tendrils rose from the ground, flailing the air furiously on all sides of the plant.

She said, "The mouthplant lacks the strength to tug anything as big as a mount into its maw. But the mount wouldn’t be able to break free. In time it would weaken and die, and then it might be pulled in. One of these plants would live for a year on that much meat."

Valentine shuddered. Carabella, lost in a forest of such things? Her lovely voice stilled forever by some ghastly plant? Her quick hands, her sparkling eyes — no. No. The thought chilled him.

"How can we find them?" he asked. "It might already be too late."

"How are they called?" the giantess asked. "Shout their names. They must be near."

"Carabella!" Valentine roared with desperate urgency. "Sleet! Carabella!"

A moment later he heard a faint answering shout; but Lisamon Hultin had heard it first, and was already going forward. Valentine saw Sleet ahead, down on one knee on the forest floor, and that knee dug in deep to keep him from being dragged into a mouthplant by the tendril that encircled his other ankle. Crouching behind him was Carabella, her arms thrust through his and hooked tight around his chest in a desperate attempt to hold him back. All about them excited tendrils belonging to neighboring plants snapped and coiled in frustration. Sleet held a knife, with which he sawed uselessly at the powerful cable that held him; and there was a trail of skid-marks in the duff, showing that he had already been drawn four or five feet toward the waiting mouth. Inch by inch he was losing the struggle for his life.

"Help us!" Carabella called.

With a stroke of her sword Lisamon Hultin severed the tendril grasping Sleet. He recoiled sharply as he was freed, toppling backward and coming within an eye-blink of being seized around the throat by the tendril of another plant; but with an acrobat’s easy grace he rolled over, avoiding the groping filament, and sprang to his feet. The warrior-woman caught him about the chest and lifted him quickly to a place behind her on her mount. Valentine now approached Carabella, who stood shaken and trembling in a safe place between two sets of thrashing tendrils, and did the same for her.

She clung to him so tightly that his ribs ached. He twisted himself around and embraced her, stroking her gently, nuzzling her ear with his lips. His relief was overwhelming and startling: he had not realized how much she had come to mean to him, nor how little he had cared about anything just now except that she was all right. Gradually her terror subsided, but he could feel her still quivering at the horror of the scene. "Another minute," she whispered. "Sleet was starting to lose his foothold — I could feel him slipping toward that plant—" Carabella winced. "Where did she come from?"

"She took some shortcut through the forest. Zalzan Kavol has hired her to protect us on the way to Ilirivoyne."

"She’s already earned her fee," Carabella said.

"Follow me," Lisamon Hultin ordered.

She chose a careful route out of the mouthplant grove, but for all her care her mount was seized twice by the leg, and Valentine’s once. Each time, the giantess cut the tendril away, and in moments they were out into the clearing and riding back down the path toward the wagon. A cheer went up from the Skandars as they reappeared.

Zalzan Kavol regarded Sleet coldly. "You chose an unwise route for your departure," he observed.

"Not nearly so unwise as the one you’ve picked," said Sleet. "I beg you excuse me. I will go on toward Mazadone by foot, and seek some sort of employment there."

"Wait," Valentine said.

Sleet looked at him inquiringly.

"Let’s talk. Come walk with me." Valentine laid his arm over the smaller man’s shoulders and drew him aside, off into a grassy glade, before Zalzan Kavol could provoke some new wrath in him.

Sleet was tense, wary, guarded. "What is it, Valentine?"

"I was instrumental in getting Zalzan Kavol to hire the giantess. But for that, you’d be tidbits for the mouthplant now."

"For that I thank you."

"I want more than thanks from you," said Valentine. "It could be said that you’re indebted to me for your life, in a way."

"That may be."

"Then I ask by way of repayment that you withdraw your resignation."

Sleet’s eyes flashed. "You don’t know what you ask!"

"The Metamorphs are strange and unsympathetic creatures, yes. But Deliamber says they’re not as menacing as often reported. Stay with the troupe, Sleet."

"You think I’m being whimsical in quitting?"

"Not at all. But irrational, perhaps."

Sleet shook his head. "I had a sending from the King, once, in which a Metamorph imposed on me a terrible fate. One listens to such sendings. I have no desire to go near the place where those beings dwell."

"Sendings don’t always bear the literal truth."

"Agreed. But often they do. Valentine, the King told me I would have a wife that I loved more dearly than my art itself, a wife who juggled with me the way Carabella does, but far more closely, so much in tune with my rhythms that it was as if we were one person." Sweat broke out on Sleet’s scarred face, and he faltered, and almost did not go on, but after a moment he said, "I dreamed, Valentine, that the Shape-shifters came one day and stole that wife of mine, and substituted for her one of their own people, disguised so cunningly that I couldn’t tell the difference. And that night, I dreamed, we performed before the Coronal, before Lord Malibor that ruled then and drowned soon after, and our juggling was perfection, it was a harmony unequaled in all of my life, and the Coronal feasted us with fine meats and wines, and gave us a bedchamber draped with silks, and I took her in my arms and began to make love, and as I entered her she changed before me and was a Metamorph in my bed, a thing of horror, Valentine, with rubbery gray skin and gristle instead of teeth, and eyes like dirty puddles, who kissed me and pressed close against me. I have not sought the body of a woman," Sleet said, "since that night, out of dread that some such thing might befall me in the embrace. Nor have I told this story to anyone. Nor can I bear the prospect of going to Ilirivoyne and finding myself surrounded by creatures with Shapeshifter faces and Shapeshifter bodies."

Compassion flooded Valentine’s spirit. In silence he held the smaller man for a moment, as if with the strength of his arms alone he could eradicate the memory of the horrific nightmare that had maimed his soul. When he released him Valentine said slowly, "Such a dream is truly terrible. But we are taught to use our dreams, not to let ourselves be crushed by them."

"This one is beyond my using, friend. Except to warn me to stay clear of Metamorphs."

"You take it too straightforwardly. What if something more oblique was intended? Did you have the dream spoken, Sleet?"

"It seemed unnecessary."

"It was you who urged me to see a speaker, when I dreamed strangely in Pidruid! I remember your very words. The King never sends simple messages, you said."

Sleet offered an ironic smile. "We are always better doctors for others than for ourselves, Valentine. In any event, it’s too late to have a fifteen-year-old dream spoken, and I am its prisoner now."

"Free yourself!"

"How?"

"When a child has a dream that he is falling, and awakens in fright, what does his parent say? That falling dreams are not to be taken seriously, because one doesn’t really get hurt in dreams? Or that the child should be thankful for a falling dream, because such a dream is a good dream, that it speaks of power and strength, that the child was not falling but flying, to a place where he would have learned something, if he had not allowed anxiety and fear to shake him loose of the dream-world?"

"That the child should be thankful for the dream," said Sleet.

"Indeed. And so too with all other ‘bad’ dreams: we must not be frightened, they tell us, but be grateful for the wisdom of dreams, and act on it."

"So children are told, yes. Even so, adults don’t always handle such dreams better than children. I recall some cries and whimpers coming from you in your sleep of late, Valentine."

"I try to learn from my dreams, however dark they may be."

"What do you want from me, Valentine?"

"That you come with us to Ilirivoyne."

"Why is that so important to you?"

Valentine said, "You belong to this troupe. We are a whole with you and broken without you."

"The Skandars are masterly jugglers. It hardly matters what the human performers contribute. Carabella and I are with the troupe for the same reason as you, to comply with a stupid law. You’ll earn your pay whether I’m with you or not."

"I learn the art from you, though."

"You can learn from Carabella. She’s as skilled as I am, and is your lover besides, who knows you better than I ever could. And the Divine spare you," said Sleet in a suddenly terrifying voice, "from losing her to the Shapeshifters in Ilirivoyne!"

"It isn’t something I fear," said Valentine. He extended his hands toward Sleet. "I would have you remain with us."

"Why?"

"I value you."

"And I value you, Valentine. But it would give me great pain to go where Zalzan Kavol would have us go. Why is it so urgent for you to insist on my enduring that pain?"

"You might be healed of that pain," said Valentine, "if you go to Ilirivoyne and find that the Metamorphs are only harmless primitives."

"I can live with my pain," Sleet replied. "The price of that healing seems too high."

"We can live with the most horrible wounds. But why not attempt to cure them?"

"There is some other thing not being spoken here, Valentine."

Valentine paused and let his breath out slowly. "Yes," he said.

"What is it, then?"

With some hesitation Valentine said, "Sleet, have I figured in your dreams at all, since we met in Pidruid?"

"You have, yes."

"In what way?"

"How does this matter?"

"Have you dreamed," said Valentine, "that I might be somewhat unusual in Majipoor, someone of more distinction and power than I myself comprehend?"

"Your bearing and poise told me that at our first meeting. And the phenomenal skill with which you learned our art. And the content of your own dreams that you’ve shared with me."

"And who am I, in those dreams, Sleet?"

"A person of might and grace, fallen through deceit from his high position. A duke, maybe. A prince of the realm."

"Or higher?"

Sleet licked his lips. "Higher, yes. Perhaps. What do you want with me, Valentine?"

"To accompany me to Ilirivoyne and beyond."

"Do you tell me that there’s truth in what I’ve dreamed?"

"This I’m yet to learn," said Valentine. "But I think there’s truth in it, yes. I feel more and more strongly that there must be truth in it. Sendings tell me there’s truth in it."

"My lord—" Sleet whispered.

"Perhaps."

Sleet looked at him in amazement and began to fall to his knees. Valentine caught him hastily and held him upright. "None of that," he said. "The others can see. I want nobody to have an inkling of this. Besides, there remain great areas of doubt. I would not have you kneeling to me, Sleet, or making starbursts with your fingers, or any of that, while I still am uncertain of the truth."

"My lord—"

"I remain Valentine the juggler."

"I am frightened now, my lord. I came within a minute of a foul death today, and this frightens me more, to stand here quietly talking with you about these things."

"Call me Valentine."

"How can I?" Sleet asked.

"You called me Valentine five minutes ago."

"That was before."

"Nothing has changed, Sleet."

Sleet shook the idea away. "Everything has changed, my lord."

Valentine sighed heavily. He felt like an impostor, like a fraud, manipulating Sleet in this way, and yet there seemed purpose to it, and genuine need. "If everything has changed, then will you follow me as I command? Even to Ilirivoyne?"

"If I must," said Sleet, dazed.

"No harm of the kind you fear will come to you among the Metamorphs. You’ll emerge from their country healed of the pain that has racked you. You do believe that, don’t you, Sleet?"

"It frightens me to go there."

"I need you by me in what lies ahead," said Valentine. "And through no choice of mine, Ilirivoyne has become part of my journey. I ask you to follow me there."

Sleet bowed his head. "If I must, my lord."

"And I ask you, by the same compulsion, to call me Valentine and show me no more respect in front of the others than you would have shown me yesterday."

"As you wish," Sleet said.

"Valentine. "

"Valentine," said Sleet reluctantly. "As you wish — Valentine."

"Come, then."

He led Sleet back to the group. Zalzan Kavol was, as usual, pacing impatiently; the others were preparing the wagon for departure. To the Skandar Valentine said, "I’ve talked Sleet into withdrawing his resignation. He’ll accompany us to Ilirivoyne."

Zalzan Kavol looked altogether dumfounded. "How did you manage to do that?"

"Yes," said Vinorkis. "What did you say to him, anyway?"

With a cheerful smile Valentine said, "It would be tedious to explain, I think."

—8—

THE PACE OF THE journey now accelerated. All day long the wagon purred along the highway, and sometimes well into the evening. Lisamon Hultin rode alongside, though her mount, sturdy as it was, needed more rest than those that drew the wagon, and occasionally she fell behind, catching up as opportunity allowed: carrying her heroic bulk was no easy task for any animal.

On they went through a tamed province of city after city, broken only by modest belts of greenery that barely obeyed the letter of the density laws. This province of Mazadone was a place where commercial pursuits kept many millions employed, for Mazadone was the gateway to all the territories of northwestern Zimroel for goods coming from the east, and the chief transshipment point for overland conveyance of merchandise of Pidruid and Til-omon heading eastward. They passed quickly in and out of a host of interchangeable and forgettable cities, Cynthion and Apoortel and Doirectine, Mazadone city itself, Borgax and Thagobar beyond it, all of them subdued and quiescent during the mourning period for the late duke, and strips of yellow dangling everywhere as sign of sorrow. It seemed to Valentine a heavy thing to shut down an entire province for the death of a duke. What would these people do, he wondered, over the death of a Pontifex? How had they responded to the premature passing of the Coronal Lord Voriax two years ago? But perhaps they took the going of their local duke more seriously, he thought, for he was a visible figure, real and present among them, whereas to people of Zimroel, thousands of miles separated from Castle Mount or Labyrinth, the Powers of Majipoor must seem largely abstract figures, mythical, legendary, immaterial. On a planet so large as this no central authority could govern with real efficiency, only symbolic control; Valentine suspected that much of the stability of Majipoor depended on a social contract whereby the local governors — the provincial dukes and the municipal mayors — agreed to enforce and support the edicts of the imperial government, provided that they might do as they pleased within their own territories.

How, he asked himself, can such a contract be upheld when the Coronal is not the anointed and dedicated prince, but some usurper, lacking in the grace of the Divine through which such fragile social constructs are sustained?

He found himself thinking more and more upon such matters during the long, quiet, monotonous hours of the eastward journey. Such thoughts surprised him with their seriousness, for he had grown accustomed to the lightness and simplicity of his mind since the early days of Pidruid, and he could feel a progressive enrichment and growing complexity of mental powers now. It was as if whatever spell had been laid upon him was wearing thin, and his true intellect was beginning to emerge.

If, that is, any such magic had actually befallen him as his gradually forming hypothesis required.

He was still uncertain. But his doubts were weakening from day to day.

In dreams now he often saw himself in positions of authority. One night it was he, not Zalzan Kavol, who led the band of jugglers; on another he presided in princely robes over some high council of the Metamorphs, whom he saw as eerie fog-like wraiths that would not hold the same shape more than a minute at a time; a night later he had a vision of himself in the marketplace at Thagobar, dispensing justice to the clothsellers and vendors of bangles in their noisy little disputes.

"You see?" Carabella said. "All these dreams speak of power and majesty."

"Power? Majesty? Sitting on a barrel in a market and expounding on equity to dealers in cotton and linen?"

"In dreams many things are translated. These visions are metaphors of high might."

Valentine smiled. But he had to admit the plausibility of the interpretation.

One night as they were nearing the city of Khyntor there came to him a most explicit vision of his supposed former life. He was in a room paneled with the finest and rarest of woods, glistening strips of semotan and bannikop and rich dark swamp mahogany, and he sat before a sharp-angled desk of burnished palisander, signing documents. The starburst crest was at his right hand; obsequious secretaries hovered about; and the enormous curving window before him revealed an open gulf of air, as though it looked out upon the titanic slope of Castle Mount. Was this a fantasy? Or was it some fugitive fragment of the buried past that had broken free and come floating up in his sleep to approach the surface of his conscious mind? He described the office and desk to Carabella and to Deliamber, hoping they could tell him how the office of the Coronal looked in reality, but they had no more idea of that than they did of what the Pontifex had for breakfast. The Vroon asked him how he had perceived himself when sitting at that palisander desk: was he golden-haired, like the Valentine who rode in the jugglers’ wagon, or dark, like the Coronal who had made grand processional through Pidruid and the western provinces?

"Dark," said Valentine immediately. Then he frowned. "Or is that so? I was sitting at the desk, not looking at the man who was there because I was the man. And yet— and yet—"

Carabella said, "In the world of dreams we often see ourselves with our own eyes."

"I could have been both fair and dark. Now one, now the other — the point escaped me. Now one, now the other, eh?"

"Yes," Deliamber said.

They were almost into Khyntor now, after too many days of steady, wearying overland travel. This, the major city of north-central Zimroel, lay in rugged, irregular terrain, broken by lakes and highlands and dark, virtually impassable forests. The route chosen by Deliamber took the wagon through the city’s southwestern suburbs, known as Hot Khyntor because of the geothermal marvels there — great hissing geysers, and a broad steaming pink lake that bubbled and gurgled ominously, and a mile or two of gray rubbery-looking fumaroles from which, every few minutes, came clouds of greenish gases accompanied by comic belching sounds and deeper, stranger subterranean groans. Here the sky was heavy with big-bellied clouds the color of dull pearls, and although the last of summer still held the land, there was a cool autumnal quality to the thin, sharp wind that blew from the north.

The River Zimr, largest in Zimroel, divided Hot Khyntor from the city proper. When the travelers came upon it, the wagon emerging suddenly from an ancient district of narrow streets to enter a broad esplanade leading to Khyntor Bridge, Valentine gasped with amazement.

"What is it?" Carabella asked.

"The river — I never expected it to be as big as this!"

"Are rivers unfamiliar to you?"

"There are none of any consequence between Pidruid and here," he pointed out. "I remember nothing clearly before Pidruid."

"Compared with the Zimr," said Sleet, "there are no rivers of any consequence anywhere. Let him be amazed."

To the right and left, so far as Valentine could see, the dark waters of the Zimr stretched to the horizon. The river was so broad here that it looked more like a bay. He could barely make out the square-topped towers of Khyntor on the far shore. Eight or ten mighty bridges spanned the waters here, so vast that Valentine wondered how it had been possible to build them at all. The one that lay directly ahead, Khyntor Bridge, was four highways wide, a structure of looping arches that rose and descended and rose and descended in great leaps from bank to bank; a short way downstream was a bridge of entirely different design, a heavy brick roadbed resting on astounding lofty piers, and just upstream was another that seemed made of glass, and gleamed with a dazzling brightness. Deliamber said, "That is Coronal Bridge, and to our right the Bridge of the Pontifex, and farther downstream is the one known as the Bridge of Dreams. All of them are ancient and famous."

"But why try to bridge the river at a place where it’s so wide?" Valentine asked in bewilderment.

Deliamber said, "This is one of the narrowest points."

The Zimr’s course, declared the Vroon, was some seven thousand miles, rising northwest of Dulorn at the mouth of the Rift and flowing in a southeasterly direction across all of upper Zimroel toward the coastal city of Piliplok on the Inner Sea. This happy river, navigable for its entire length, was a swift and phenomenally broad stream that flowed in grand sweeping curves like some amiable serpent. Its shores were occupied by hundreds of wealthy cities, major inland ports, of which Khyntor was the most westerly. On the far side of Khyntor, running off to the northeast and only dimly visible in the cloudy sky, were the jagged peaks of the Khyntor Marches, nine great mountains on whose chilly flanks lived tribes of rough, high-spirited hunters. These people could be found in Khyntor much of the year, exchanging hides and meat for manufactured goods.

That night in Khyntor, Valentine dreamed he was entering the Labyrinth to confer with the Pontifex.

This was no vague and misty dream, but one with sharp, painful clarity. He stood under harsh winter sunlight on a barren plain, and saw before him a roofless temple with flat white walls, which Deliamber told him was the gateway to the Labyrinth. The Vroon and Lisamon Hultin were with him, and Carabella too, walking in a protective phalanx, but when Valentine stepped out onto the bare slate platform between those white walls he was alone. A being of sinister and forbidding aspect confronted him. This creature was of alien shape, but belonged to none of the non-human forms long settled on Majipoor — neither Liiman nor Ghayrog nor Vroon nor Skandar nor Hjort nor Su-Suheris, but something mysterious and disturbing, a muscular thick-armed creature with cratered red skin and a blunt dome of a head out of which blazed yellow eyes bright with almost intolerable rage. This being demanded Valentine’s business with the Pontifex in a low, resonant voice.

"Khyntor Bridge is in need of repair," Valentine replied. "It is the ancient duty of the Pontifex to deal with such matters."

The yellow-eyed creature laughed. "Do you think the Pontifex will care?"

"It is my responsibility to summon his aid."

"Go, then." The guardian of the portal beckoned with sardonic politeness and stepped aside. As Valentine went past, the being uttered a chilling snarl, and slammed shut a gateway behind Valentine. Retreat was impossible. Before him lay a narrow winding corridor, sourcelessly lit by some cruel white light that numbed the eyes. For hours Valentine descended on a spiral path. Then the walls of the corridor widened, and he found himself in another roofless temple of white stone, or perhaps the same one as before, for the pockmarked red-skinned being again blocked his way, growling with that unfathomable anger.

"Behold the Pontifex," the creature said.

And Valentine looked beyond it into a darkened chamber and saw the imperial sovereign of Majipoor seated upon a throne, clad in robes of black and scarlet, and wearing the royal tiara. And the Pontifex of Majipoor was a monster with many arms and many legs, and the face of a man but wings of a dragon, and he sat shrieking and roaring upon the throne like a madman. A terrible whistling sound came from his lips, and the smell of the Pontifex was a frightful stink, and the black leathery wings flailed the air with fierce intensity, buffeting Valentine with cold gales. "Your majesty," Valentine said, and bowed, and said, again, "Your majesty."

"Your lordship," replied the Pontifex. And laughed, and reached for Valentine and tugged him forward, and then Valentine was on the throne and the Pontifex, laughing insanely, was fleeing up the brightly lit corridors, running and flapping wings and raving and shrieking, until he was lost from sight.

Valentine woke, wet with perspiration, in Carabella’s arms. She showed a look of concern bordering on fear, as if the terrors of his dream had been only too obvious to her, and she held him a moment, saying nothing, until he had had a chance to comprehend the fact that he was awake. Tenderly she stroked his cheeks. "You cried out three times," she told him.

"There are occasions," he said after gulping a little wine from a flask beside the bed, "when it seems more wearying to sleep than to remain awake. My dreams are hard work, Carabella."

"There’s much in your soul that seeks to express itself, my lord."

"It expresses itself in a very strenuous way," Valentine said, and nestled down against her breasts. "If dreams are the source of wisdom, I pray to grow no wiser before dawn."

—9—

IN KHYNTOR, ZALZAN KAVOL booked passage for the troupe aboard a riverboat bound toward Ni-moya and Piliplok. They would be journeying only a short way down the river, though, to the minor city of Verf, gateway to the Metamorph territory.

Valentine regretted having to leave the riverboat at Verf. when he could easily, for another ten or fifteen royals, sail all the way to Piliplok and take ship for the Isle of Sleep. That, after all, and not the Shapeshifter reservation, was his most urgent immediate destination: the Isle of the Lady, where perhaps he might find confirmation of the visions that tormented him. But that was not to be, just yet.

Destiny, Valentine thought, could not be rushed. Thus far things had moved with deliberate speed but toward some definite, if not always understandable, goal. He was no longer the cheerful and simple idler of Pidruid, and, although he had no sure knowledge of what it was he was becoming, he had a definite sense of inner transition, of boundaries passed and not to be recrossed. He saw himself as an actor in some vast and bewildering drama the climactic scenes of which were still far away in space and time.

The riverboat was a grotesque and fanciful structure, but not without a beauty of sorts. Oceangoing ships such as had been in port at Pidruid were designed for grace and sturdiness, since they would face journeys of thousands of miles between harbors; but the riverboat, a short-haul vessel, was squat and broad-beamed, more of a floating platform than a ship, and as if to compensate for the inelegance of its design its builders had festooned it with ornament — a great soaring bridge topped with triple figureheads painted in brilliant reds and yellows, an enormous central courtyard almost like a village plaza, with statuary and pavilions and game-parlors, and, at the stern, an upswept superstructure of many levels in which passengers were housed. Belowdecks were cargo holds, steerage quarters, dining halls, and cabins for the crew, as well as the engine room, from which two gigantic smokestacks sprouted that came curving up the sides of the hull and rose skyward like the horns of a demon. The entire frame of the ship was of wood, metal being too scarce on Majipoor for such large-scale enterprises and stone being generally deemed undesirable for maritime use; and the carpenters had exerted their imaginations over nearly every square foot of the surface, decorating it with scrollwork, bizarre dadoes, outjutting joists, and similar flourishes of a hundred kinds.

The riverboat seemed a vast and teeming microcosm. As they waited for sailing, Valentine and Deliamber and Carabella strolled the deck, thronged with citizens of many districts and of all the races of Majipoor. Valentine saw frontiersmen from the mountains beyond Khyntor, Ghayrogs in the finery affected in Dulorn, people of the humid southlands in cool white linens, travelers in sumptuous robes of crimson and green which Carabella said were typical of western Alhanroel, and many others. The ubiquitous Liimen sold their ubiquitous grilled sausages; officious Hjorts strutted about in uniforms of the riverboat line, giving information and instructions to those who asked and to many who did not; a Su-Suheris family in diaphanous green robes, conspicuous because of their unlikely double-headed bodies and aloof, imperious mien, drifted like emissaries from the world of dreams through the crowds, who gave way in automatic deference. And there was one small group of Metamorphs on deck that afternoon.

Deliamber saw them first. The little Vroon made a clucking sound and touched Valentine’s hand. "See them? Let’s hope Sleet doesn’t."

"Which ones?" Valentine asked.

"By the railing. Standing alone, looking uneasy. They wear their natural form."

Valentine stared. There were five of them, perhaps a male and a female adult and three younger ones. They were slender, angular, long-legged beings, the older ones taller than he, with a frail, insubstantial look to them. Their skins were sallow, almost green in hue. Their faces approached the human pattern in construction, except that their cheekbones were sharp as blades, their lips were almost nonexistent and their noses were reduced to mere bumps, and their eyes, set on angles that sloped inward toward the center, were tapered and without pupils. Valentine was unable to decide whether these Metamorphs bore themselves with arrogance or with timidity: certainly they must regard themselves as in hostile territory aboard this riverboat, these natives of the ancient race, these descendants of those who had possessed Majipoor before the coming of the first Earthborn settlers fourteen thousand years ago. He could not take his eyes from them.

"How is the changing of shape accomplished?" he asked.

"Their bones are not joined like those of most races," answered Deliamber. "Under muscular pressure they will move and take up new patterns. Also they have mimicry cells in their skins, that allow them to alter color and texture, and there are other adaptations. An adult can transform itself almost instantaneously."

"And what purpose does this serve?"

"Who can say? Most likely the Metamorphs ask what purpose there was in creating races in this universe that are unable to shift shape. It must have some value to them."

"Very little," said Carabella acidly, "if they could have such powers and still have their world snatched away from them."

"Shifting shape is not enough of a defense," Deliamber replied, "when people travel from one star to another to steal your home."

The Metamorphs fascinated Valentine. To him they represented artifacts of Majipoor’s long history, archaeological relicts, survivors from the era when there were no humans here, nor Skandars nor Vroons nor Ghayrogs, only these fragile green people spread out across a colossal planet. Before the settlers came — the intruders, ultimately the conquerors. How long ago it had been! He wished they would perform a transformation as he watched, perhaps turn into Skandars or Liimen before his eyes. But they remained unwavering in their identities.

Shanamir, looking agitated, appeared suddenly out of the crowd. He seized Valentine’s arm and blurted, "Do you know what’s on board with us? I heard the cargo-handlers talking. There’s a whole family of Shape—"

"Not so loud," Valentine said. "Look yonder."

The boy looked and shivered. "Scary things, they are."

"Where’s Sleet?"

"On the bridge, with Zalzan Kavol. They’re trying to get a permit to perform tonight. If he sees them—"

"He’ll have to confront Metamorphs sooner or later," Valentine murmured. To Deliamber he said, "Is it uncommon for them to be seen outside their reservation?"

"They are found everywhere, but never in great numbers, and rarely in their own form. There might be eleven of them living in Pidruid, say, and six in Falkynkip, nine in Dulorn—"

"Disguised?"

"Yes, as Ghayrogs or Hjorts or humans, whatever seems best in a certain place."

The Metamorphs began to leave the deck. They moved with great dignity, but, unlike the little Su-Suheris group, there was nothing imperious about them; they seemed rather to give an impression of wishing they were invisible.

Valentine said, "Do they live in their territory by choice or compulsion?"

"Some of each, I think. When Lord Stiamot completed the conquest, he forced them to leave Alhanroel entirely. But Zimroel was barely settled then, just the coastal outposts, and they were allowed most of the interior. They chose only the territory between the Zimr and the southern mountains, though, where access could easily be controlled, and withdrew into that. By now there’s a tradition that the Metamorphs dwell only in that territory, except for the unofficial few living out in the cities. But I have no idea whether that tradition has force of law. Certainly they pay little attention to the decrees that emerge from the Labyrinth or Castle Mount."

"If imperial law matters so little to them, are we not taking great risks in going to Ilirivoyne?"

Deliamber laughed. "The days when Metamorphs attacked outsiders for the sheer love of vengeance are long over, so I am assured. They are a shy and sullen people, but they will do us no harm, and we’ll probably leave their country intact and well laden with the money that Zalzan Kavol loves so much. Look, here he comes now."

The Skandar, with Sleet beside him, approached, looking self-satisfied.

"We have arranged the right to perform," he announced. "Fifty crowns for an hour’s work, right after dinner! We’ll give them our simplest tricks, though. Why exert ourselves before we get to Ilirivoyne?"

"No," Valentine said. "We should do our best." He looked hard at Sleet. "There’s a party of Metamorphs aboard this boat. Perhaps they’ll carry the word of our excellence ahead of us to Ilirivoyne."

"Wisely argued," said Zalzan Kavol.

Sleet was taut and fearful. His nostrils flickered, his lips compressed, he made holy signs with his left hand at his side. Valentine turned to him and said in a low voice, "Now the process of healing begins. Juggle for them tonight as you would for the court of the Pontifex."

Hoarsely Sleet said, "They are my enemies!"

"Not these. They are not the ones of your dream. Those have done you all the damage that lay in their power, and it was long ago."

"It sickens me to be on the same boat."

"There’s no leaving it now," Valentine said. "There are only five of them. A small dose — good practice for meeting what awaits us in Ilirivoyne."

"Ilirivoyne—"

"There is no avoiding Ilirivoyne," said Valentine. "Your pledge to me, Sleet—"

Sleet regarded Valentine in silence a moment.

"Yes, my lord," he whispered.

"Come, then. Juggle with me: we both need practice. And remember to call me Valentine!"

They found a quiet place belowdecks and worked out with the clubs; there was an odd reversal in their roles at first, for Valentine juggled flawlessly, while Sleet was as clumsy as a tyro, dropping the clubs constantly and in several instances bruising his fingers. But in a few minutes his disciplines asserted themselves. He filled the air with clubs, interchanging them with Valentine in patterns of such complexity that it left Valentine laughing and gasping, and finally he had to beg a halt and ask Sleet to return to more manageable cascades.

That night at the deckside performance — their first since the impromptu event staged for the amusement of the forest-brethren — Zalzan Kavol ordered a program that they had never done before an audience. The jugglers divided into three groups of three — Sleet, Carabella, and Valentine; Zalzan Kavol, Thelkar, and Gibor Haern; Heitrag Kavol, Rovorn, and Erfon Kavol — and engaged in simultaneous triple exchanges in the same rhythm, one group of Skandars juggling knives, the other flaming torches, and the humans silver clubs. It was one of the most severe tests of his skills that Valentine had yet experienced. The symmetry of the routine depended on perfection. One dropped implement by any of the nine would ruin the total effect. He was the weakest link; on him the entire impact of the performance depended, therefore.

But he dropped no clubs, and the applause, when the jugglers had ended their act in a flurry of high throws and jaunty catches, was overwhelming. As he took his bows Valentine noticed the family of Metamorphs seated only a few rows away. He glanced at Sleet, who bowed and bowed again, ever more deeply.

As they skipped from the stage Sleet said, "I saw them when we started, and then I forgot about them. I forgot about them. Valentine!" He laughed. "They were nothing at all like the creature I remember from my dream."

—10—

THE TROUPE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in a dank, crowded hold in the bowels of the riverboat. Valentine found himself jammed between Shanamir and Lisamon Hultin on the thinly cushioned floor, and the proximity of the warrior-woman seemed to guarantee that he would have no sleep, for her snoring was a fierce insistent buzz, and more distracting even than the snore was the fear that as her vast body rolled and thrashed about beside him he would be crushed beneath it. Several times indeed she fetched up against him and he was hard put to extricate himself. But soon she lay more quietly, and he felt sleep stealing over him.

A dream came in which he was Coronal, Lord Valentine of the olive skin and black beard, and sat once more in Castle Mount wielding the seals of power, and then somehow he was in a southern city, a moist steaming tropical place of giant vines and gaudy red blossoms, a city that he knew to be Til-omon at the far side of Zimroel, and he attended there a grand feast in his honor. There was another high guest at the table, a somber-eyed man with coarse skin, who was Dominin Barjazid, second son of the King of Dreams, and Dominin Barjazid poured wine in honor of the Coronal, and offered toasts, crying out long life and predicting a glorious reign, a reign to rank with those of Lord Stiamot and Lord Prestimion and Lord Confalume. And Lord Valentine drank, and drank again, and grew flushed and merry, and offered toasts of his own, to his guest and to the mayor of Til-omon and to the duke of the province, and to Simonan Barjazid the King of Dreams, and to the Pontifex Tyeveras, and to the Lady of the Isle, his own beloved mother, and the goblet was filled and filled once again, amber wine and red wine and the blue wine of the south, until finally he could drink no more, and went to his bedchamber and dropped instantly into sleep. As he slept figures moved about him, the men of Dominin Barjazid’s entourage, lifting him and carrying him wrapped in silken sheets, taking him somewhere, and he could give no resistance, for it seemed to him that his arms and legs would not obey him, as if this were a dream, this scene within a dream. And Valentine beheld himself on a table in a secret room, and now his hair was yellow and his skin was fair, and it was Dominin Barjazid who wore the face of the Coronal.

"Take him to some city in the far north," said the false Lord Valentine, "and turn him loose, and let him make his own way upon the world."

The dream would have continued, but Valentine found himself smothering in his sleep, and came up into consciousness to discover Lisamon Hultin sprawled against him with one of her beefy arms over his face. With some effort he freed himself, but then there was no returning to sleep.

In the morning he said nothing to anyone of his dream: it was becoming time, he suspected, to keep the informations of the night to himself, for they were starting to border on affairs of state. This was the second time he had dreamed of having been supplanted as Coronal by Dominin Barjazid, and Carabella, weeks ago, had dreamed that enemies unknown had drugged him and stolen his identity. All these dreams might yet prove to be nothing but fantasy or parable, but Valentine inclined now to doubt that. There was too strong a consistency to them, too frequent a repetition of underlying structures.

And if a Barjazid now wore the starburst crown? What then, what then?

The Valentine of Pidruid would have shrugged and said, No matter, one overlord is the same as another; but the Valentine now sailing from Khyntor to Verf took a more thoughtful view of things. There was a balance of power in this world, a balance carefully designed over a span of thousands of years, a system that had been evolving since Lord Stiamot’s time, or perhaps earlier, out of whatever forgotten polities had ruled Majipoor in the first centuries of the settlement. And in that system an inaccessible Pontifex ruled through the vehicle of a vigorous and dynamic Coronal of his own choosing, with the official known as the King of Dreams functioning to execute the commands of the government and chastise lawbreakers by virtue of his entry into the minds of sleepers, and the Lady of the Isle, mother of the Coronal, contributing a tempering of love and wisdom. There was strength to the system, or else it could not have endured so many thousands of years; under it, Majipoor was a happy and prosperous world, subject, true, to the frailties of flesh and the vagaries of nature, but mainly free of conflict and suffering. What now, Valentine wondered, if a Barjazid of the King’s blood were to put aside a lawfully constituted Coronal and interpose himself in that divinely ordained balance? What harm to the commonwealth, what disruption of public tranquility?

And what might be said of a fallen Coronal who chooses to accept his altered destiny and leaves the usurper unchallenged? Was that not an abdication, and had there ever been an abdication of a Coronal in Majipoor’s history? Would he not thereby become a co-conspirator in Dominin Barjazid’s overthrow of order?

The last of his hesitations were going from him. It had seemed a comical thing, or a bizarre one, to Valentine the juggler when the first hints had come to him that he might be truly Lord Valentine the Coronal. That had been an absurdity, a lunacy, a farce. No longer. The texture of his dreams carried the weight of plausibility. A monstrous thing had happened, indeed. The full import of it was only now coming clear to him. And it was his task, that he must accept without further question, to set things right.

But how? Challenge an incumbent Coronal? Rise up in juggler’s costume to claim Castle Mount?

He spent the morning quietly, giving no hint of his thoughts. Mostly he remained at the rail, staring at the far-off shore. The river’s immensity was beyond his understanding: at some points here it was so wide that no land could be seen, and in other places what Valentine took to be the shore turned out to be islands, themselves of great size, with miles of water between their farther sides and the riverbank. The flow of the river was strong, and the huge riverboat was being swept rapidly along eastward.

The day was bright, and the river rippled and glinted in the sparkling sunlight. In the afternoon a light rain began to fall, out of clouds so compact that the sunlight remained bright around them. The rain increased in intensity and the jugglers were forced to cancel their second performance, to Zalzan Kavol’s great annoyance. They huddled under cover.

That night Valentine took care to sleep beside Carabella, and left the snores of Lisamon Hultin for the Skandars to cope with. He waited almost eagerly for revealing new dreams. But what came to him was useless, the ordinary formless hodgepodge of fantasy and chaos, of nameless streets and unfamiliar faces, of bright lights and garish colors, of absurd disputes, disjointed conversations, and unfocused images, and in the morning the riverboat arrived at the port of Verf on the river’s southern bank.

—11—

"THE PROVINCE OF THE METAMORPHS," said Autifon Deliamber, "is named Piurifayne, after the name by which the Metamorphs call themselves in their own language, which is Piurivar. It is bounded on the north by the outlying suburb of Verf, on the west by the Velathys Scarp, on the south by the substantial range of mountains known as the Gonghars, and on the east by the River Steiche, an important tributary of the Zimr. I have beheld each of those boundary zones with my own eyes, though I have never entered Piurifayne itself. To enter is difficult, for the Velathys Scarp is a sheer wall a mile high and three hundred miles long; the Gonghars are storm-swept and disagreeable; and the Steiche is a wild unruly river full of rapids and turbulence. The only rational way in is through Verf and down through Piurifayne Gate."

The jugglers now were only a few miles north of that entrance, having left the drab mercantile city of Verf as quickly as possible. The rain, light but insistent, had continued all morning. The countryside here was unexciting, a place of light sandy soil and dense stands of dwarf trees with pale green bark and narrow, twittering leaves. There was little conversation in the wagon. Sleet seemed lost in meditation, Carabella juggled three red balls obsessively in the mid-cabin space, the Skandars who were not driving engaged in some intricate game played with slivers of ivory and packets of black drole-whiskers, Shanamir dozed, Vinorkis made entries in a journal he carried, Deliamber entertained himself with minor incantations, the lighting of tiny necromantic candles, and other wizardly amusements, and Lisamon Hultin, who had hitched her mount to the team drawing the wagon so that she could come in from the rain, snored like a beached sea-dragon, awakening now and then to gulp a globelet of the cheap gray wine she had bought in Verf.

Valentine sat in a corner, up against a window, thinking of Castle Mount. What could it be like, a mountain thirty miles high? A single stone shaft rising like a colossal tower into the dark night of space? If Velathys Scarp, a mile high, was as Deliamber said an impassable wall, what sort of barrier was a thing thirty times as tall? What shadow did Castle Mount cast when the sun was in the east? A dark stripe running the length of Alhanroel? And how were the cities on its lofty slope provided with warmth, and air to breathe? Some machines of the ancients, Valentine had heard, that manufactured heat and light, and dispensed sweet air, miraculous machines of that forgotten technological era of thousands of years ago, when the old arts brought from Earth still were widely practiced here; but he could no more comprehend how such machines might work than he understood what forces operated the engines of memory in his own mind to tell him that this dark-haired woman was Carabella, this white-haired man Sleet. He thought too of Castle Mount’s highest reaches, and that building of forty thousand rooms at its summit, Lord Valentine’s Castle now, Lord Voriax’ not so long ago. Lord Malibor’s when he was a boy in that childhood he no longer remembered. Lord Valentine’s Castle! Was there really such a place, or was the Castle and its Mount only a fable, a vision, a fantasy such as comes in dreams? Lord Valentine’s Castle! He imagined it clinging to the mountaintop like a coat of paint, a bright splash of color just a few molecules thick, or so it would seem against the titanic scale of that impossible mountain, a splash that coursed irregularly down the flank of the summit in a tentacular way, hundreds of rooms extending on this face, hundreds more on that, a cluster of great chambers extending themselves pseudopod-fashion here, a nest of courtyards and galleries over there. And in its innermost place the Coronal in all grandeur, dark-bearded Lord Valentine, except that the Coronal would not be there now, he would still be making his grand processional through the realm, in Ni-moya by now or some other eastern city. And I, thought Valentine, I once lived on that Mount? Dwelled in that Castle? What did I do, when I was Coronal — what decrees, what appointments, what duties? The whole thing was inconceivable, and yet, and yet, he felt the conviction growing in him, there was fullness and density and substance to the phantom bits of memory that drifted through his mind. He knew now that he had been born not in Ni-moya by the river’s bend, as the false recollections planted in his mind had it, but rather in one of the Fifty Cities high up on the Mount, almost at the verge of the Castle itself, and that he had been reared among the royal caste, among that cadre from which princes were chosen, that his childhood and boyhood had been one of privilege and comfort. He still had no memory of his father, who must have been some high prince of the realm, nor could he recall anything of his mother except that her hair was dark and her skin was swarthy, as his once had been, and — a memory rushed into his awareness out of nowhere — and that she had embraced him a long while one day, weeping a little, before she told him that Voriax had been chosen as Coronal in the place of the drowned Lord Malibor, and she would go thenceforth to live as Lady on the Isle of Sleep. Was there truth to that, or had he imagined it just now? He would have been — Valentine paused, calculating — twenty-two years old, very likely, when Voriax came to power. Would his mother have embraced him at all? Would she have wept, on becoming Lady? Or rather rejoice, that she and her eldest son were chosen Powers of Majipoor? To weep and to rejoice at once, maybe. Valentine shook his head. These mighty scenes, these moments of potent history: would he ever regain access to them, or was he always to labor under the handicap placed upon him by those who had stolen his past?

There was a tremendous explosion in the distance, a long low ground-shaking boom that brought everyone in the wagon to attention. It continued for several minutes and gradually subsided to a quiet throb, then to silence.

"What was that?" Sleet cried, groping in the rack for an energy-thrower.

"Peace, peace," Deliamber said. "It is the sound of Piurifayne Fountain. We are approaching the boundary."

"Piurifayne Fountain?" Valentine asked.

"Wait and see," Deliamber told him.

The wagon came to a halt a few minutes later. Zalzan Kavol turned round from the driver’s seat and yelled, "Where’s that Vroon? Wizard, there’s a roadblock up ahead!"

"We are at Piurifayne Gate," said Deliamber. A barricade made of stout glossy yellow logs lashed with a bright emerald twine spanned the narrow roadway, and to the left of it was a guardhouse occupied by two Hjorts in customs-official uniform of gray and green. They ordered everyone out of the wagon and into the rain, though they themselves were under a protective canopy. "Where bound?" asked the fatter Hjort. "Ilirivoyne, to play at the Shapeshifter festival. We are jugglers," said Zalzan Kavol.

"Permit to enter Piurifayne Province?" the other Hjort demanded.

"No such permits are required," Deliamber said.

"You speak too confidently, Vroon. By decree of Lord Valentine the Coronal more than a month past, no citizens of Majipoor enter the Metamorph territory except on legitimate business."

"Ours is legitimate business," growled Zalzan Kavol

"Then you would have a permit."

"But we knew nothing of the need for one!" the Skandar protested.

The Hjorts looked indifferent to that. They seemed ready to turn their attention to other matters.

Zalzan Kavol glanced toward Vinorkis as though expecting him to have some sort of influence with his compatriots. But the Hjort merely shrugged. Zalzan Kavol glared at Deliamber next and said, "It falls within your responsibilities, wizard, to advise me of such matters."

The Vroon shrugged. "Not even wizards can learn of changes in the law that happen while they travel in forest preserves and other remote places."

"But what do we do now? Turn back to Verf?" The idea seemed to bring a glow of delight to Sleet’s eyes. Reprieved from this Metamorph adventure after all! But Zalzan Kavol was fuming. Lisamon Hultin’s hand strayed to the hilt of her vibration-sword. Valentine stiffened at that.

He said quietly to Zalzan Kavol, "Hjorts are not always incorruptible."

"A good thought," the Skandar murmured. Zalzan Kavol drew forth his money-pouch. Instantly the attention of the Hjorts sharpened. This was indeed the right tactic, Valentine decided.

"Perhaps I have found the necessary document," said Zalzan Kavol. Ostentatiously removing two one-crown pieces from the pouch, he caught a Hjort’s rough-skinned puffy hand in one of his, and with the others pressed a coin into each palm, smiling his most self-satisfied smile. The Hjorts exchanged glances, and they were not glances of bliss. Contemptuously they allowed the coins to fall to the muddy ground.

"A crown?" Carabella muttered in disbelief. "He expected to buy them with a crown?"

"Bribing an officer of the imperial government is a serious offense," the fatter Hjort declared ominously. "You are under arrest and remanded for trial to Verf. Remain in your vehicle until appropriate escort can be found for you."

Zalzan Kavol looked outraged. He whirled, began to say something to Valentine, choked it off, gestured angrily at Deliamber, made a growling noise, and spoke in a low voice and in the Skandar language to the three nearest of his brothers. Lisamon Hultin again began to finger her sword-hilt. Valentine felt despair. There would be two dead Hjorts here in another moment, and the jugglers would all be criminal fugitives at the edge of Piurifayne. That was not likely to speed his journey to the Lady of the Isle.

"Do something quickly," Valentine said under his breath to Autifon Deliamber.

But the Vroonish sorcerer was already in motion. Stepping forward, he snatched up the money and offered it again to the Hjorts, saying, "Your pardon, but you must have dropped these small coins." He dropped them into the Hjorts’ hands, and at the same time allowed the tips of his tentacles to coil lightly about their wrists for an instant.

When he released them, the thinner Hjort said, "Your visa is good for three weeks only, and you must leave Piurifayne by way of this gate. Other exit points are illegal for you."

"Not to mention very dangerous," added the other. He gestured and unseen figures pulled the barricade sideways fifteen feet along a buried track, so that there was room for the wagon to proceed.

As they entered the wagon Zalzan Kavol said furiously to Valentine, "In the future, give me no illegal advice! And you, Deliamber: make yourself aware of the regulations that apply to us. This could have caused us great delay, and much loss of income."

"Perhaps if you had tried bribing with royals instead of crowns," Carabella said beyond the Skandar’s range of hearing, "we would have had a simpler time of it."

"No matter, no matter," Deliamber said. "We were admitted, were we not? It was only a small sorcery, and cheaper than a heavy bribe."

"These new laws," Sleet began. "So many decrees!"

"A new Coronal," said Lisamon Hultin. "He wants to show his power. They always do. They decree this, they decree that, and the old Pontifex goes along with everything. This one decreed me right out of a job, do you know that?"

"How so?" Valentine asked.

"I was bodyguard to a merchant in Mazadone, much afraid of jealous rivals. This Lord Valentine placed a new tax on personal bodyguards for anyone below noble rank, amounting to my whole year’s salary; and my employer, damn his ears, let me go on a week’s notice! Two years, and it was goodbye, Lisamon, thank you very much, take a bottle of my best brandy as your going-away gift." She belched resonantly. "One day I was the defender of his miserable life, the next I was a superfluous luxury, and all thanks to Lord Valentine! Oh, poor Voriax! D’ye think his brother had him murdered?"

"Guard your tongue!" Sleet snapped. "Such things aren’t done on Majipoor."

But she persisted. "A hunting accident, was it? And the last one, old Malibor, drowned while out fishing? Why are our Coronals suddenly dying so strangely? It never happened before like this, did it? They went on to become Pontifex, they did, and hid themselves away in the Labyrinth and lived next to forever, and now here we have Malibor feeding the seadragons and Voriax taking a careless bolt in the forest." She belched again. "I wonder. Up there on Castle Mount, maybe they’re getting too hungry for the taste of power."

"Enough," Sleet said, looking uncomfortable with such talk.

"Once a new Coronal’s picked, all the rest of the princes are finished, you know, no hope of advancement. Unless, unless, unless, unless the Coronal should die, and back they go into the hopper to be picked again. When Voriax died and this Valentine came to rule, I said—"

"Stop it!" Sleet cried.

He rose to his full height, which was hardly chest-high to the warrior-woman, and his eyes blazed as if he planned to chop her off at the thighs to equalize matters between them. She remained at her ease, but her hand again was wandering toward her sword. Smoothly Valentine interposed himself.

"She means no offense to the Coronal," he said gently. "She is fond of wine, and it loosens her tongue." And to Lisamon Hultin he said, "Forgive him, will you? My friend is under strain in this part of the world, as you know."

A second enormous explosion, five times as loud and fifty times as frightening as the one that had occurred half an hour earlier, interrupted the discussion. The mounts reared and squealed; the wagon lurched; Zalzan Kavol shouted ferocious curses from the driver’s seat.

"Piurifayne Fountain," Deliamber announced. "One of the great sights of Majipoor, well worth getting wet to see."

Valentine and Carabella rushed from the wagon, the others close behind. They had come to an open place in the road, where the forest of little green-boled trees fell away to create a kind of natural amphitheater, completely without vegetation, running perhaps half a mile back from the highway. At its farther end a geyser was in eruption, but a geyser that was to the ones Valentine had seen at Hot Khyntor as a sea-dragon is to a minnow. This was a column of frothing water that seemed taller than the tallest tower in Dulorn, a white shaft rising five hundred feet, six hundred, possibly even more, roaring out of the ground with incalculable force. At its upper end, where its unity broke and gave way to streamers and spouts and ropes of water that darted off in many directions, a mysterious light appeared to glow, kindling a whole spectrum of hues at the fringes of the column, pinks and pearls and crimsons and pale lavenders and opals. A warm spray filled the air.

The eruption went on and on — an incredible volume of water driven by incredible might into the sky. Valentine felt his entire body massaged by the subterranean forces that were at work. He stared in awe and wonder, and it was almost with shock that he realized that the event was ending, the column now was shrinking, no more than four hundred feet, three hundred, now just a pathetic strand of white sinking toward the ground, now only forty feet, thirty, and then gone, gone, vacant air where that stunning shaft had been, droplets of warm moisture as its only revenant.

"Every thirty minutes," Autifon Deliamber informed them. "As long as the Metamorphs have lived on Majipoor, so it is said, that geyser has never been a minute late. It is a sacred place to them. See? There are pilgrims now."

Sleet caught his breath and began making holy signs. Valentine put a steadying hand to his shoulder. Indeed Metamorphs, Shapeshifters, Piurivars, a dozen or more of them, gathered at a kind of wayside shrine not far ahead. They were looking at the travelers, and, Valentine thought, not in a particularly friendly way. Several of the aborigines in the front of the group stepped briefly behind others, and when they reappeared they looked strangely blurred and indistinct, but that was not all, for they had undergone transformations. One had sprouted great cannonballs of breasts, in caricature of Lisamon Hultin, and another had grown four shaggy Skandar-arms, and another was mimicking Sleet’s white hair. They made a curious thin sound which might have been the Metamorph version of laughter, and then the entire group slipped away into the forest.

Valentine did not release his grip on Sleet’s shoulder until he felt some of the tension ebb from the little juggler’s rigid body. Lightly he said, "A good trick that is! If we could do that — perhaps grow some extra arms in the middle of our act — what do you say, Sleet, would you like that?"

"I would like to be in Narabal," Sleet said, "or Piliplok, or someplace else very far from here."

"And I in Falkynkip, feeding slops to my mounts," said Shanamir, who looked pale and shaken.

"They mean us no harm," Valentine said. "This will be an interesting experience, one that we will never forget."

He smiled broadly. But there were no smiles about him, not even on Carabella, Carabella the inextinguishably buoyant. Zalzan Kavol himself looked oddly discomforted, as if perhaps he might now be having second thoughts about the wisdom of pursuing his love of royals into the Metamorph province. Valentine could not, by sheer force of optimistic energy alone, give his companions much cheer. He looked toward Deliamber.

"How far is it to Ilirivoyne?" he asked. "It lies somewhere ahead," the Vroon replied. "How far, I have no idea. We will come to it when we come to it." It was not an encouraging reply.

—12—

THIS WAS PRIMORDIAL COUNTRY, timeless, unspoiled, an outpost of time’s early dawn on civilized and housebroken Majipoor. The Shapeshifters lived in rain-forest land, where daily downpours cleansed the air and let vegetation run riot. Out of the north came the frequent storms, down into that natural funnel formed by Velathys Scarp and the Gonghars; and as the moist air rose in the ascent of the Gonghar foothills, gentle rains were released, that soaked the light spongy soil. Trees grew tall and slender-trunked, sprouting high and forming thick canopies far overhead; networks of creepers and lianas tied the treetops together; cascades of dark leaves, tapering, drip-tipped, glistened as if polished by the rain. Where there were breaks in the forest, Valentine could see distant green-cloaked mist-wrapped mountains, heavy-shouldered, forbidding, great mysterious bulks crouching on the land. Of wildlife there was little, at least not much that let itself be seen: an occasional red-and-yellow serpent slithering along a bough, an infrequent green-and-scarlet bird or toothy web-winged brown aeorlizard fluttering overhead, and once a frightened bilantoon that scampered delicately in front of the wagon and vanished into the woods with a flurry of its sharp little hooves and panicky wigwagging of its upturned tufted tail. Probably forest-brethren lurked here, since several groves of dwikka-trees came into view. And no doubt the streams were thick with fish and reptiles, the forest floor teemed with burrowing insects and rodents of fantastic hue and shape, and for all Valentine knew, each of the innumerable dark little lakes held its own monstrous submerged amorflbot, that arose by night to prowl, all neck and teeth and beady eyes, for whatever prey came within reach of its massive body. But none of these things made themselves apparent as the wagon sped southward over the rough, narrow wilderness road.

Nor were the Piurivars themselves much in evidence — now and then a well-worn trail leading into the jungle, or a few flimsy wickerwork huts visible just off the road, or a party of half a dozen pilgrims heading on foot up toward the shrine at the Fountain. They were, said Deliamber, a folk that lived by hunting and fishing, and collecting wild fruits and nuts, and a certain amount of agriculture. Possibly their civilization had once been more advanced, for ruins had been discovered, especially on Alhanroel, of large stone cities thousands of years old, that might have dated from early Piurivar times before the starships arrived — although, Deliamber said, there were some historians who maintained that the ruins were those of ancient human settlements, founded and destroyed in the turbulent pre-Pontifical period twelve to thirteen thousand years ago. At any rate the Metamorphs, if they had ever had a more complex way of life, now preferred to be forest-dwellers. Whether that was retrogression or progress Valentine could not say.

By mid-afternoon the sound of Piurifayne Fountain could no longer be heard behind them, and the forest was more open, more thickly settled. The road was unmarked, and, unexpectedly, it forked in a place where no clues were to be had to anything beyond. Zalzan Kavol looked for guidance to Deliamber, who looked to Lisamon Hultin.

"Damn my gut if I could say," the giantess boomed. "Pick one at random. We’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of getting to Ilirivoyne on it."

But Deliamber had a better idea, and knelt down in the mud to cast an inquiry-spell. He took from his pack a couple of cubes of a wizardy incense. Shielding them from the rain with his cloak, he ignited them to create a pale brown smoke. This he inhaled, while waving his tentacles in intricate curlicues.

The warrior-woman snorted and said, "It’s only a fraud. He’ll wiggle his arms for a while and then he’ll make a guess. Fifty-fifty for Ilirivoyne."

"The left fork," Deliamber announced eventually. It was good sorcery or else lucky guessing, for shortly signs of Metamorph occupation increased. There were no more isolated scatterings of lonely huts, but now little clumps of wickerwork dwellings, eight or ten or more close together every hundred yards, and then even closer. There was much foot traffic too, mainly aboriginal children carrying light burdens in slings dangling from their heads. Many stopped as the wagon went by, and stared and pointed and made little cluttering sounds between their teeth.

Definitely they were approaching a large settlement. The road was crowded with children and older Metamorphs, and dwellings were numerous. The children were an unsettling crew. They seemed to be practicing their immature skills at transformation as they walked along, and took many forms, most of them bizarre: one had sprouted legs like stilts, another had tentacular Vroonish arms that dangled almost to the ground, a third had swollen its body to a globular mass supported by tiny props. "Are we the circus entertainers," Sleet asked, "or are they? These people sicken me!"

"Peace," Valentine said softly.

In a grim voice Carabella said, "I think some of the entertainments here are dark ones. Look."

Just ahead were a dozen large wicker cages by the side of the road. Teams of bearers, having apparently just put them down, were resting beside them. Through the bars of the cages small long-fingered hands were thrust, and some prehensile tails coiling in anguish. As the wagon drew alongside, Valentine saw that the cages were full of forest-brethren, jammed three and four together, on their way to Ilirivoyne for — what? To be slaughtered for food? To be tormented at the festival? Valentine shivered.

"Wait!" Shanamir blurted, as they rode past the final cage. "What’s that in there?"

The last cage was bigger than the others, and what it held was no forest-brother, but rather some other sort of captive, a being of obvious intelligence, tall and strange, with dark blue skin, fierce and desolate purple eyes of extraordinary intensity and luminosity, and a wide, thin-lipped slash of a mouth. Its clothing — a fine green fabric — was ripped and tattered, and splotched with dark stains, possibly blood. It gripped the bars of its cage with terrible force, shaking and tugging at them, and cried out hoarsely at the jugglers for help in an odd, totally unfamiliar accent. The wagon went on.

Chilled, Valentine said to Deliamber, "That is no being of Majipoor!"

"No," Deliamber said. "None that I’ve seen before."

"I saw one once," Lisamon Hultin put in. "An offworlder, native to some star close by here, though I forget the name of it."

"But what would offworlders be doing here?" Carabella asked. "There’s little traffic between the stars these days, and few ships come to Majipoor."

"Still, some do," Deliamber said. "We’re not yet totally cut off from the starlanes, though certainly we’re considered a backwater in the commerce of the worlds. And—"

"Are you all mad?" Sleet burst out in exasperation. "Sitting here like scholars, discussing the commerce between the worlds, and in that cage is a civilized being crying for help, who probably will be stewed and eaten at the Metamorph festival? And we pay no attention to its cries, but ride blithely onward into their city?" He made a tormented sound of anger and went rushing forward to the Skandars on the driver’s seat. Valentine, fearing trouble, went after him. Sleet tugged at Zalzan Kavol’s cloak. "Did you see it?" he demanded. "Did you hear? The offworlder in the cage?"

Without turning, Zalzan Kavol said, "So?"

"You’ll ignore its cries?"

"This is no affair of ours," the Skandar replied evenly. "Shall we liberate the prisoners of an independent people? They must have some reason for arresting that being."

"Reason? Yes, to cook him for dinner! And we’ll be in the next pot. I ask you to go back and release—"

"Impossible."

"At least let’s ask of it why it’s caged! Zalzan Kavol, we may be riding blithely to our deaths! Are you in such a hurry to reach Ilirivoyne that you’ll ride right past someone who may know something about conditions here, and who is in such a plight?"

"What Sleet says has wisdom in it," Valentine remarked.

"Very well!" Zalzan Kavol snorted. He pulled the wagon to a halt. "Go and investigate, Valentine. But be quick about it."

"I’ll go with him," Sleet said.

"Stay here. If he feels he needs a bodyguard, let him take the giantess."

That seemed sensible. Valentine beckoned to Lisamon Hultin, and they got down from the wagon and strode back toward the place of the cages. Instantly the forest-brethren set up a frantic screeching and banging on their bars. The Metamorph bearers — armed, Valentine noticed now, with effective-looking short dirks of polished horn or wood — unhurriedly formed themselves into a phalanx in the road, keeping Valentine and Lisamon Hultin from a closer approach to the large cage. One Metamorph, plainly the leader, stepped forward and waited with menacing calmness for inquiries.

Valentine said quietly to the giantess, "Will he speak our language?"

"Probably. Try it."

"We are a troupe of roving jugglers," Valentine said in a loud, clear voice, "come to perform at the festival we hear you hold at Ilirivoyne. Are we near Ilirivoyne now?"

The Metamorph, half a head taller than Valentine, though much flimsier of build, seemed amused.

"You are in Ilirivoyne," was the cool, remote reply.

Valentine moistened his lips. These Metamorphs gave off a thin, sharp odor, acrid but not disagreeable. Their strangely sloped eyes were frighteningly expressionless. He said, "To whom would we go to make arrangements for performing in Ilirivoyne?"

"The Danipiur interviews all strangers who come to Ilirivoyne. You will find her at the House of Offices."

The Metamorph’s frosty self-contained manner was disconcerting. After a moment Valentine said, "One thing more. We see that in that large cage you keep a being of an unfamiliar sort. May I ask, for what purpose?"

"Punishment."

"A criminal?"

"So it is said," the Metamorph replied distantly. "Why does this concern you?"

"We are strangers in your land. If strangers are placed in cages here, we might prefer to find employment somewhere else."

There was a flicker of some emotion — amusement? contempt? — around the Metamorph’s mouth and nostrils. "Why should you fear such a thing? Are you criminals?"

"Hardly."

"Then you will not be caged. Pay your respects to the Danipiur and address further questions to her. I have important tasks to complete."

Valentine looked toward Lisamon Hultin, who shrugged. The Metamorph walked away. There was nothing more to do but return to the wagon.

The bearers were lifting the cages and fastening them to poles laid across their backs. From the large cage came a roar of anger and despair.

—13—

ILIRIVOYNE WAS NEITHER a city nor a village, but something intermediate, a forlorn concentration of many low, impermanent-looking structures of withes and light woods, arranged along irregular unpaved streets that seemed to stretch for considerable distances into the forest. The place had a makeshift look, as though Ilirivoyne might have been located elsewhere a few years ago and might be in an altogether other district a few years hence. That it was festival-time in Ilirivoyne was signaled, apparently, by fetish-sticks of some sort planted in front of almost every house, thick shaven stakes to which bright ribbons and bits of fur had been attached; also on many streets scaffolding had been erected, as for performances, or, thought Valentine uneasily, for tribal rites of some darker kind.

Finding the House of Offices and the Danipiur was simple. The main street opened into a broad plaza bordered on three sides by small domed buildings with ornately woven roofs, and on the fourth by a larger structure, the first three-story building they had seen in Ilirivoyne, with an elaborate garden of globular thick-stemmed gray-and-white shrubs in front of it. Zalzan Kavol drew the wagon into a clearing just outside the plaza.

"Come with me," the Skandar said to Deliamber. "We’ll see what we can arrange."

They were inside the House of Offices a long while. When they emerged, a female Metamorph of great presence and authority was with them, doubtless the Danipiur, and the three stood together by the garden in elaborate conversation. The Danipiur pointed; Zalzan Kavol alternately nodded and shook his head; Autifon Deliamber, dwarfed between the two tall beings, made frequent graceful gestures of diplomatic conciliation. Finally Zalzan Kavol and the Vroon returned to the wagon. The Skandar’s mood seemed brighter.

"We’ve come just in time," he announced. "The festival has already begun. Tomorrow night is one of the major holidays."

"Will they pay us?" Sleet asked.

"So it would seem," said Zalzan Kavol. "But they will supply us with no food, and no lodging either, for Ilirivoyne is without hostelries. And there are certain specified zones of the city that we may not enter. I have had friendlier welcomes in other places. But also less friendly ones now and then, I suppose."

Crowds of solemn, silent Metamorph children trailed after them as they moved the wagon from the plaza to an area just back of it where they could park. In late afternoon they held a practice session, and though Lisamon Hultin did her formidable best to clear the young Metamorphs from the scene and keep them away, it was impossible to prevent them from slipping back, emerging between trees and out of bushes to stare at the jugglers. Valentine found it unnerving to work in front of them, and he was plainly not the only one, for Sleet was tense and uncharacteristically awkward, and even Zalzan Kavol, the master of masters, dropped a club for the first time in Valentine’s memory. The silence of the children was disturbing — they stood like blank-eyed statues, a remote audience that drained energy and gave none in return — but even more troublesome was their trick of metamorphosis, their way of slipping from one shape to another as casually as a human child might suck its thumb. Mimicry was their apparent purpose, for the forms they took were crude, half-recognizable versions of the jugglers, such as the older Metamorphs had attempted earlier at Piurifayne Fountain. The children held the forms only briefly — their skills seemed feeble — but in the pauses between routines Valentine saw them now sprouting golden hair for him, white for Sleet, black for Carabella, or making themselves bearish and many-armed like the Skandars, or trying to imitate faces, individual features, expressions, everything done in a distorted and unflattering way.

The travelers slept crammed aboard the wagon that night, one packed close upon the other, and all night, so it seemed, a steady rain fell. Valentine only occasionally was able to sleep; he dropped into light dozes, but mainly he lay awake listening to Lisamon Hultin’s lusty snoring or the even more grotesque sounds coming from the Skandars. Somewhere in the night he must have had some real sleep, for a dream came to him, hazy and incoherent, in which he saw the Metamorphs leading a procession of prisoners, forest-brethren and the blue-skinned alien, up the road toward Piruifayne Fountain, which erupted and rose above the world like a colossal white mountain. And again toward morning he slept soundly for a time, until Sleet woke him by shaking his shoulder a little before dawn.

Valentine sat up, rubbing his eyes. "What is it?"

"Come outside. I have to talk."

"It’s still dark!"

"Even so. Come!"

Valentine yawned, stretched, got creakily to his feet. He and Sleet picked their way carefully over the slumbering forms of Carabella and Shanamir, went warily around one of the Skandars, and down the steps of the wagon. The rain had stopped, but the morning was dark and chilly, and a nasty fog rose from the ground.

"I have had a sending," Sleet said. "From the Lady, I think."

"Of what sort?"

"About the blue-skinned one, in the cage, that they said was a criminal going to be punished. In my dream he came to me and said he was no criminal at all, but only a traveler who had made the error of entering Shapeshifter territory, and had been captured because it’s their custom to sacrifice a stranger in Piurifayne Fountain at festival-time. And I saw how it is done, the victim bound hand and foot and left in the basin of the Fountain, and when the explosion comes he is hurled far into the sky."

Valentine felt a chill that did not come from the morning mist. "I dreamed something similar," he said.

"In my dream I heard more," Sleet went on. "That we are in danger too, not perhaps from sacrifice but in danger all the same. And if we rescue the alien, he will help us to safety, but if we leave him to die, we will not leave Piurivar country alive. You know I fear these Shapeshifters, Valentine, but this dream is something new. It came to me with the clarity of a sending. It ought not be dismissed as more fears of foolish Sleet."

"What do you want to do?"

"Rescue the alien."

Valentine said uneasily, "And if he really was a criminal? By what right do we meddle in Piurivar justice?"

"By right of sending," said Sleet. "Are those forest-brethren criminals too? I saw them also go into the Fountain. We are among savages, Valentine."

"Not savages, no. But strange folk, whose way is not like the ways of Majipoor."

"I’m determined to set the blue-skinned one free. If not with your help, then by myself."

"Now?"

"What better time?" Sleet asked. "It’s still dark. Quiet. I’ll open the cage; he’ll slip off into the jungle."

"You think the cage is unguarded? No, Sleet. Wait. This makes no sense. You’ll jeopardize us all if you act now. Let me try to find out more about this prisoner and why he’s caged, and what’s intended for him. If they do mean to sacrifice him, they’d do it at some high point of the festival. There’s time."

"The sending is on me now," Sleet said.

"I dreamed a dream something like yours."

"But not a sending."

"Not a sending, no. Still, enough to let me think your dream holds truth. I’ll help you, Sleet. But not now. This isn’t the moment for it."

Sleet looked restless. Clearly in his mind he was already on the way to the place of the cages, and Valentine’s opposition was thwarting him.

"Sleet?"

"Yes?"

"Hear me. This is not the moment. There is time."

Valentine looked steadily at the juggler. Sleet returned his gaze with equal steadfastness for a moment; then, abruptly, his resolve broke and he lowered his eyes. "Yes, my lord," he said quietly.

During the day Valentine tried to gain information about the prisoner, but with little success. The cages, eleven holding forest-brethren and the twelfth holding the alien, now had been installed in the plaza opposite the House of Offices, stacked in four tiers with the alien’s cage alone on high, far above the ground. Piurivars armed with dirks guarded them.

Valentine approached, but he was only halfway across the plaza when he was stopped. A Metamorph told him, "This is forbidden for you to enter."

The forest-brethren began frantically to rattle their bars. The blue-skinned one called out, thickly accented words that Valentine could barely understand. Was the alien saying, "Flee, fool, before they kill you too!" or was that only Valentine’s heightened imagination at work? The guards held a tight cordon around the place. Valentine turned away. He attempted to ask some children nearby if they could explain the cages to him; but they looked at him in obstinate silence, giving him cool blank-eyed stares and murmuring to one another and making little partial metamorphoses that mimicked his fair hair, and then they scattered and ran as though he were some sort of demon.

All morning long Metamorphs entered Ilirivoyne, swarming in from the outlying forest settlements. They brought with them decorations of many sorts, wreaths and buntings and draperies and mirror-bedecked posts and tall poles carved with mysterious runes; everyone seemed to know what to do, and everyone was intensely busy. No rain fell after sunrise. Was it by witchcraft, Valentine wondered, that the Piurivars provided a rare dry day for their high holiday, or only coincidence?

By mid-afternoon the festivities were under way. Small bands of musicians played heavy, pulsating, jangling music of eccentric rhythm, and throngs of Metamorphs danced a slow and stately pattern of interweavings, moving almost like sleep-walkers. On certain streets races were run, and judges stationed at points along the course engaged in intricate arguments as the racers went past them. Booths apparently constructed during the night dispensed soups, stews, beverages, and grilled meats.

Valentine felt like an intruder in this place. He wanted to apologize to the Metamorphs for having come among them at their holiest time. Yet no one but the children seemed to be paying the slightest attention to them, and the children evidently regarded them as curiosities brought here for their amusement. Young shy Metamorphs lurked everywhere, flashing jumbled imitations of Deliamber and Sleet and Zalzan Kavol and the rest, but never allowing anyone to get close to them.

Zalzan Kavol had called a rehearsal for late afternoon, back of the wagon. Valentine was one of the first to arrive, glad of an excuse to remove himself from the crowded streets. He found only Sleet and two of the Skandars.

It seemed to him that Zalzan Kavol was eyeing him in an odd way. There was something new and disturbing about the quality of the Skandar’s attentiveness. After a few minutes Valentine was so troubled by it that he said, "Is something wrong?"

"What would be wrong?"

"You seem out of countenance."

"I? I? Nothing’s the matter. A dream, is all. I was thinking on a dream I had last night."

"You dreamed of the blue-skinned prisoner?"

Zalzan Kavol looked baffled. "Why do you think that?"

"I did, and Sleet."

"My dream had nothing at all to do with the blue-skinned one," the Skandar replied. "Nor do I wish to discuss it. It was foolishness, mere foolishness." And Zalzan Kavol, moving away, picked up a double brace of knives and began to juggle them in an edgy, absent-minded way.

Valentine shrugged. It had not even occurred to him that Skandars had dreams, let alone that they might have troublesome ones. But of course: they were citizens of Majipoor, they shared in all the attributes of people here, and so they must live full and rich dream-lives like everyone else, with sendings from King and Lady, and stray intrusions from the minds of lesser beings, and upwellings of self from their own deeper reaches, even as humans did, or, Valentine supposed, Hjorts and Vroons and Liimen. Still, it was curious. Zalzan Kavol was so guarded of emotion, so unwilling to let anything of himself be seen by others save greed and impatience and irritation, that Valentine found it strange that he would admit something so personal as that he was pondering a dream.

He wondered if Metamorphs had meaningful dreams, and sendings, and all of that.

The rehearsal went well. Afterward the jugglers made a light and not very satisfying dinner of fruits and berries that Lisamon Hultin had gathered in the forest, and washed it down with the last of the wine they had brought from Khyntor. Bonfires now were blazing in many streets of Ilirivoyne, and the discordant music of the various bands set up weird clashing near-harmonies. Valentine had assumed the performance would take place in the plaza, but no, Metamorphs in what perhaps were priestly costumes came at darkness to escort them to some entirely other part of town, a much larger oval clearing that already was ringed by hundreds or even thousands of expectant onlookers. Zalzan Kavol and his brothers went over the ground carefully, checking for pitfalls and irregularities that might disrupt their movements. Sleet usually took part in that, but, Valentine noticed abruptly, Sleet had vanished somewhere between the rehearsal place and this clearing. Had his patience run out, had he gone off to do something rash? Valentine was just about to set out in search when Sleet appeared, breathing lightly as though he had just been jogging.

"I went to the plaza," he said in a low voice. "The cages are still piled up. But most of the guards must be off at the dancing. I was able to exchange a few words with the prisoner before I was chased."

"And?"

"He said he’s to be sacrificed at midnight in the Fountain, exactly as in my sending. And tomorrow night the same will happen to us."

"What?"

"I swear it by the Lady," said Sleet. His eyes were like augers. "It was under pledge to you, my lord, that I came into this place. You assured me no harm would befall me."

"Your fears seemed irrational."

"And now?"

"I begin to revise my opinion," Valentine said. "But we’ll set out of Ilirivoyne in good health. I pledge you that. I’ll speak with Zalzan Kavol after the performance, and after I’ve had a chance to confer with Deliamber."

"It would please me more to get on the road sooner."

"The Metamorphs are feasting and drinking this evening. They’ll be less likely to notice our departure later," said Valentine, "and less apt to pursue us, if pursuit is their aim. Besides, do you think Zalzan Kavol would agree to cancel a performance merely on the rumor of danger? We’ll do our act, and then we’ll begin to extricate ourselves. What do you say?"

"I am yours, my lord," Sleet replied.

—14—

IT WAS A SPLENDID PERFORMANCE, and no one was in better form than Sleet, who did his blind-juggling routine and carried it off flawlessly. The Skandars flung torches at one another with giddy abandon, Carabella cavorted on the rolling globe, Valentine juggled while dancing, skipping, kneeling, and running. The Metamorphs sat in concentric circles around them, saying little, never applauding, peering in at them out of the foggy darkness with unfathomable intensity of concentration.

Working to such an audience was hard. It was worse than working in rehearsal, for no one expects an audience then, but now there were thousands of spectators and they were giving nothing to the performers; they were statue-still, as the children had been, an austere audience that offered neither approval nor disapproval but only something that had to be interpreted as indifference. In the face of that, the jugglers presented ever more taxing and marvelous numbers, but for more than an hour they could get no response.

And then, astoundingly, the Metamorphs began a juggling act of their own, an eerie dreamlike counterfeit of what the troupe had been doing.

By twos and threes they came forward from the darkness, taking up positions in the center of the ring only a few yards from the jugglers. As they did so they swiftly shifted forms, so that six of them now wore the look of bulky shaggy Skandars, and one was small and lithe and much like Carabella, and one had Sleet’s compact form, and one, yellow-haired and tall, wore the image of Valentine. There was nothing playful about this donning of the jugglers’ bodies: to Valentine it seemed ominous, mocking, distinctly threatening, and when he looked to the side at the non-performing members of the troupe he saw Autifon Deliamber making worried gestures with his tentacles, Vinorkis scowling, and Lisamon Hultin rocking evenly back and forth on the balls of her feet as if readying herself for combat.

Zalzan Kavol looked disconcerted also by this development.

"Continue," he said in a ragged tone. "We are here to perform for them."

"I think," said Valentine, "we are here to amuse them, but not necessarily as performers."

"Nevertheless, we are performers, and we will perform."

He gave a signal and launched, with his brothers, into a dazzling interchange of multitudinous sharp and dangerous objects. Sleet, after a moment’s hesitation, scooped up a handful of clubs and began to throw them in cascades, as did Carabella. Valentine’s hands were chilled; he felt no willingness in them to juggle.

The nine Metamorphs alongside them were beginning to juggle now too.

It was only counterfeit juggling, dream-juggling, with no true art or skill to it. It was mockery and nothing more. They held in their hands rough-skinned black fruits, and bits of wood, and other ordinary things, and threw them from hand to hand in a child’s parody of juggling, now and again failing to make even those simple catches and bending quickly to retrieve what they had dropped. Their performance aroused the audience as nothing that the true jugglers had done had managed to do. The Metamorphs now were humming — was this their form of applause? — and rocking rhythmically, and clapping hands to knees, and, Valentine saw, some of them were transforming themselves almost at random, taking on odd alternate forms, human or Hjort or Su-Suheris as the whim struck, or modeling themselves after the Skandars or Carabella or Deliamber. At one point he saw six or seven Valentines in the rows nearest him.

Performing was all but impossible in such a circus of distractions, but the jugglers clung grimly to their routines for some minutes more, doing poorly now, dropping clubs, missing beats, breaking up long-familiar combinations. The humming of the Metamorphs grew in intensity.

"Oh, look, look!" Carabella cried suddenly.

She gestured toward the nine mock jugglers, and pointed at the one who represented Valentine.

Valentine gasped.

What the Metamorph was doing defied all comprehension, and struck him rigid with terror and astonishment. For it had begun to oscillate between two forms. One was the Valentine-image, the tall, wide-shouldered, big-handed, golden-haired young man.

And the other was the image of Lord Valentine the Coronal.

The metamorphosis was almost instantaneous, like the flashing of a light. One moment Valentine saw his twin before him, and the next instant there was, in his place, the black-bearded fierce-eyed Coronal, a figure of might and presence, and then he was gone and the simple juggler was back. The humming of the crowd became louder: they approved of the show. Valentine . . . Lord Valentine . . . Valentine . . . Lord Valentine . . .

As he watched, Valentine felt a trail of icy chill go down his back, felt his scalp prickle, his knees quiver. There was no mistaking the import of this bizarre pantomime. If ever he had hoped for confirmation of all that had swept through him these weeks since Pidruid, he was getting it now. But here? In this forest town, among these aboriginal folk?

He looked into his own mimicked face.

He looked into the face of the Coronal.

The other eight jugglers leaped and pranced in a nightmarish dance, their legs rising high and stamping down, the false Skandar-arms waving and thumping against their sides, the false Sleet-hair and Carabella-hair wild in the night wind, and the Valentine-figure remained still, alternating one face and the other, and then it was over; nine Metamorphs stood in the center of the circle, holding out their hands to the audience, and the rest of the Piurivars were on their feet and dancing in the same wild way.

The performance was ended. Still dancing, the Metamorphs streamed out into the night, toward the booths and games of their festival.

Valentine, stunned, turned slowly and saw the frozen, astonished faces of his companions. Zalzan Kavol’s jaw sagged, his arms dangled limply. His brothers clustered close behind him, their eyes wide in awe and shock. Sleet looked frighteningly pale; Carabella the opposite, her cheeks flushed, almost feverish. Valentine held out a hand toward them. Zalzan Kavol came stumbling forward, dazed, all but tripping over his own feet. The giant Skandar paused a few feet from Valentine. He blinked, he ran his tongue over his lips, he seemed to be working hard to make his voice function at all.

Finally he said, in a tiny, preposterous voice: "My lord . . . ?"

First Zalzan Kavol and then his five brothers dropped hesitantly and awkwardly to their knees. With trembling hands Zalzan Kavol made the starburst symbol; his brothers did the same. Sleet, Carabella, Vinorkis, Deliamber, all knelt as well. The boy Shanamir, looking frightened and baffled, stared open-mouthed at Valentine. He seemed paralyzed with wonder and surprise. Slowly he bent to the ground also.

Lisamon Hultin cried out, "Have you all gone crazy?"

"Down and pay homage!" Sleet ordered her hoarsely. "You saw it, woman! He is the Coronal! Down and pay homage!"

"The Coronal?" she repeated in confusion. Valentine stretched his arms out over them all in a gesture that was as much one of comfort as blessing. They were frightened of him and of what had just befallen; so too was he, but his fear was passing quickly, and in its place came strength, conviction, sureness. The sky itself seemed to cry at him: You are Lord Valentine who was Coronal on Castle Mount, and you shall have the Castle again one day, if you fight for it. Through him now flowed the power of his former imperial office. Even here, in this rain-swept remote hinterland, in this ramshackle aboriginal town, here with the sweat of juggling still on his body, here in these coarse common clothes, Valentine felt himself to be what he once had been, and although he did not understand what metamorphosis had been worked on him to make him what he now was, he no longer questioned the reality of the messages that had come in dreams. And he felt no guilt, no shame, no deceitfulness, at receiving this homage from his stupefied companions.

"Up," he said gently. "All of you. On your feet. We must get out of this place. Shanamir, round up the mounts. Zalzan Kavol, get the wagon ready." To Sleet he said, "Everyone should be armed. Energy-throwers for those who know how to use them, juggling knives for the rest. See to it."

Zalzan Kavol said heavily, "My lord, there is in all this the flavor of a dream. To think that all these weeks I traveled with— to think I spoke roughly to— that I quarreled with—"

"Later," Valentine said. "We have no time for discussing these things now."

He turned to Lisamon Hultin, who seemed busy in some conversation with herself, moving her lips, gesturing, explaining things to herself, debating these bewildering events. In a quiet, forceful voice Valentine said, "You were hired only to bring us as far as Ilirivoyne. I need you to give us your strength as we escape. Will you stay with us to Ni-moya and beyond?"

"They made the starburst at you," she said puzzledly. "They all kneeled. And the Metamorphs — they—"

"I was once Lord Valentine of Castle Mount. Accept it. Believe it. The realm has fallen into dangerous hands. Remain at my side, Lisamon, as I journey east to set things right."

She put her huge meaty hand over her mouth and looked at him in amazement.

Then she began to sag into an homage, but he shook his head, caught her by the elbow, would not let her kneel. "Come," he said. "That doesn’t matter now. Out of here!"

They gathered up their juggling gear and sprinted through the darkness toward the wagon, far across town. Shanamir and Carabella had already taken off, and were running well ahead. The Skandars moved in a single ponderous phalanx, shaking the ground beneath them; Valentine had never seen them move so quickly before. He ran just behind them, alongside Sleet. Vinorkis, splay-footed and slow, struggled to keep pace with them. To the rear was Lisamon Hultin. She had scooped up Deliamber and was carrying the little wizard perched in the crook of her left arm; in her right she bore her unsheathed vibration-sword.

As they neared the wagon Sleet said to Valentine, "Shall we free the prisoner?"

"Yes."

He beckoned to Lisamon Hultin. She put Deliamber down and followed him.

With Sleet in the lead, they ran toward the plaza. To Valentine’s relief it was all but empty, no more than a handful of Piurivar guards on duty. The twelve cages still were stacked in tiers at the far end, four on the bottom, then rows of four and three, and the one containing the blue-skinned alien perched on top. Before the guards could react Lisamon Hultin was among them, seizing them two at a time and hurling them far across the plaza.

"Take no lives," Valentine warned.

Sleet, monkey-swift, was scrambling up the stack of cages. He reached the top and began to cut through the thick withes that held the cage door shut. With brisk sawing motions of the knife he slashed while Valentine held the withes taut. In a moment the last of the fibers was severed and Valentine hoisted the door. The alien clambered out, stretching his cramped limbs and looking questioningly at his rescuers.

"Come with us," Valentine said. "Our wagon is over there, beyond the plaza. Do you understand?"

"I understand," said the alien. His voice was deep, harsh, resonant, with a sharp clipped edge to each syllable. Without another word he swung himself down past the cages of the forest-brethren to the ground, where Lisamon Hultin had finished dealing with the Metamorph guards and was piling them tidily in a heap.

Impulsively Valentine sliced through the lashings on the cage of forest-brethren nearest to him. The busy little hands of the creatures reached through the bars and pulled the latch, and out they came. Valentine went on to the next cage. Sleet had already descended.

"One moment," Valentine called. "The job’s not quite done."

Sleet drew his knife and set to work. In moments all the cages were open, and the forest-brethren, dozens of them, were disappearing into the night.

As they ran to the wagon Sleet said, "Why did you do that?"

"Why not?" Valentine asked. "They want to live too." Shanamir and the Skandars had the wagon ready to go, the mounts hitched, the rotors turning. Lisamon Hultin was the last one in; she slammed the door behind her and yelled to Zalzan Kavol, who took off immediately.

And just in time, for half a dozen Metamorphs appeared and began running frantically after them, shouting and gesticulating. Zalzan Kavol stepped up the wagon’s speed. Gradually the pursuers fell behind and were lost to sight as the wagon entered the utter darkness of the jungle.

Sleet peered worriedly back. "Do you think they’re still following us?"

"They can’t keep up with us," said Lisamon Hultin. "And they travel only by foot. We’re safely out of there."

"Are you sure?" Sleet asked. "What if they have some side route to take in catching up with us?"

"Worry about that when we must," said Carabella. "We’re moving quickly." She shuddered. "And let it be a long while before we see Ilirivoyne again!"

They fell silent. The wagon glided swiftly onward. Valentine sat slightly apart from the others. It was inevitable, yet it distressed him, for he was still more Valentine than Lord Valentine, and it was strange and disagreeable to set himself up above his friends. But there was no helping it. Carabella and Sleet, learning privately of his identity, had come to terms with it privately in their own ways; Deliamber, who had known the truth before Valentine himself, had never been overly awed by it; but the others, whatever suspicions they may have had that Valentine was something more than a happy-go-lucky wanderer, were dumfounded by the open acknowledgment of his rank that had come out of the grotesque Metamorph performance. They stared; they were speechless; they sat in stiff, unnatural postures, as if afraid to slouch in the presence of a Coronal. But how should one behave in the presence of a Power of Majipoor? They could not sit here constantly making starbursts at him. The gesture seemed absurd to Valentine anyway, a comical outpoking of the fingers and nothing more: his growing sense of his own importance did not seem to include much spirit of self-importance yet.

The alien introduced himself as Khun of Kianimot, a world of a star relatively close by Majipoor. He seemed a dark and brooding sort, with a crystalline anger and despair at his core, something integral to his being, that expressed itself, Valentine thought, in the set of his lips and the tone of his voice and particularly in the intense gaze of his strange, haunted purple eyes. Of course it was possible, Valentine conceded, that he was projecting his own human notions of expression onto this alien being, and that perhaps Khun was, as Kianimot folk went, a person of total jollity and amiability. But he doubted that.

Khun had come to Majipoor two years before, on business that he chose not to explain. It was, he said bitterly, the greatest mistake of his life, for among the merry Majipoorans he had been parted from all his money, he had unwisely embarked on a journey to Zimroel unaware that there was no starport on that continent from which he could depart for his home world, and he had even more foolishly ventured into Piurivar territory, thinking he could recoup his losses in some sort of trade with the Metamorphs. But they had seized him instead and thrust him in the cage, and held him prisoner for weeks, meaning to give him to the Fountain on the high night of their festival.

"Which would perhaps have been best," he said. "One quick blast of water and all this wandering would be at an end. Majipoor makes me weary. If I am destined to die on this world of yours, I think I would prefer it to be soon."

"Pardon us for rescuing you," Carabella said sharply.

"No. No. I mean no ingratitude. But only—" Khun paused. "This place has been grief for me. So too was Kianimot. Is there any place in the universe where life does not mean suffering?"

"Has it been that bad?" asked Carabella. "We find it tolerable here. Even the worst is tolerable enough, considering the alternative." She laughed. "Are you always this gloomy?"

The alien shrugged. "If you are happy, I admire and envy you. I find existence painful and life meaningless. But these are dark thoughts for one who has just been rescued. I thank you for your aid. Who are you, and what rashness brought you to Piurifayne, and where do you go now?"

"We are jugglers," said Valentine, with a sharp glance at the others. "We came to this province because we thought there was work for us here. And if we succeed in getting away from this place, we’ll head for Ni-moya, and down the river to Piliplok."

"And from there?"

Valentine gestured vaguely. "Some of us will make the pilgrimage to the Isle. Do you know what that is? And the others — I can’t say where they’ll go."

"I must reach Alhanroel," Khun said. "My only hope lies in going home, which is impossible from this continent. In Piliplok perhaps I can arrange passage across the sea. May I travel with you?"

"Of course."

"I have no money."

"We see that," said Valentine. "It makes no difference." The wagon moved on swiftly through the night. No one slept, except in occasional quick naps. A light rain was falling now. In the darkness of the forest, dangers might lie on any side, but there was a paradoxical comfort in not being able to see anything, and the wagon sped on unmolested.

After an hour or so Valentine looked up and saw Vinorkis standing before him, gaping like a gaffed fish and quivering with what must be unbearable tension. "My lord?" he said in a tiny voice.

Valentine nodded to the Hjort. "You’re trembling, Vinorkis."

"My lord — how do I say this? — I have a terrible confession to make—"

Sleet opened his eyes and glared bleakly. Valentine signaled him to be calm.

Vinorkis said, "My lord—" and faltered. He began again. "My lord, in Pidruid a man came to me and said, ‘There is a tall fair-haired stranger at a certain inn and we believe he has committed monstrous crimes.’ And this man offered me a bag of crowns if I would keep close by the fair-haired stranger, and go wherever he went, and give news of his doings to the imperial proctors every few days."

"A spy?" Sleet blurted. His hand flew to the dagger at his hip.

"Who was this man who hired you?" Valentine asked quietly.

The Hjort shook his head. "Someone in the service of the Coronal, by the way he dressed. I never knew his name."

"And you gave these reports?" Valentine said.

"Yes, my lord," Vinorkis murmured, staring at his feet. "In every city. After a time I hardly believed that you could be the criminal they said you were, for you seemed kind and gentle and sweet of soul, but I had taken their money, and there was more money for me every time I reported—"

"Let me kill him now," Sleet muttered harshly.

"There’ll be no killing," Valentine said. "Neither now nor later."

"He’s dangerous, my lord!"

"Not any longer."

"I never trusted him," Sleet said. "Nor did Carabella, nor Deliamber. It wasn’t just that he was Hjort. There was always something shifty about him, sly, insinuating. All those questions, all that sucking around for information—"

Vinorkis said, "I ask pardon. I had no idea whom I was betraying, my lord."

"You believe that?" Sleet cried.

"Yes," Valentine said. "Why not? He had no more idea who I was than — than I did. He was told to trail a fair-haired man and give information to the government. Is that so evil a thing? He was serving his Coronal, or so he thought. His loyalty must not be repaid by your dagger, Sleet."

"My lord, sometimes you are too innocent," Sleet said.

"Perhaps true. But not this time. We have much to gain by forgiving this man, and nothing at all by slaying him." To the Hjort Valentine said, "You have my pardon, Vinorkis. I ask only that you be as loyal to the true Coronal as you’ve been to the false."

"You have my pledge, my lord."

"Good. Get yourself some sleep, now, and put away your fear."

Vinorkis made the starburst and backed away, settling down in mid-cabin beside two of the Skandars.

Sleet said, "That was unwise, my lord. What if he continues to spy on us?"

"In these jungles? Messages to whom?"

"And when we leave the jungles?"

"I think he can be trusted," said Valentine. "I know, this confession may have been only a double ruse, to lull us into casting aside our suspicions. I’m not as naive as you think, Sleet. I charge you to keep private watch over him when we reach civilization again — just in case. But I think you’ll find his repentance is genuine. And I have uses for him that will make him valuable to me."

"Uses, my lord?"

"A spy can lead us to other spies. And there’ll be other spies, Sleet. We may want Vinorkis to maintain his contacts with the imperial agents, eh?"

Sleet winked. "I see your meaning, my lord!"

Valentine smiled, and they fell silent.

Yes, he told himself, Vinorkis’ horror and remorse were genuine. And provided much that Valentine needed to know; for if the Coronal had been willing to pay good sums to have an insignificant wanderer followed from Pidruid to Ilirivoyne, how insignificant could that wanderer actually be? Valentine felt a weird prickling along his skin. More than anything else, Vinorkis’ confession was a confirmation of all that Valentine had discovered about himself. Surely, if the technique that had been used to cast him from his body was new and relatively untried, the conspirators would be uncertain about how permanent the mind-wiping would be, and would hardly dare to allow the outcast Coronal to roam about the land free and unobserved. A spy, then, and probably others close by; and the threat of quick preventive action if word got back to the usurper that Valentine was beginning to recover his memory. He wondered how carefully the imperial forces were tracking him, and at what point they would choose to intercept him on his journey toward Alhanroel.

Onward the wagon moved in the blackness of night.

Deliamber and Lisamon Hultin conferred endlessly with Zalzan Kavol about the route; the other main Metamorph settlement, Avendroyne, lay somewhere to the southeast of Ilirivoyne, in a gap between two great mountains, and it seemed likely that the road they were on would take them there. To ride blithely into another Metamorph town hardly seemed wise, of course. Word must have gone on ahead of the freeing of the prisoner and the escape of the wagon. Still, there was even greater peril in trying to go back toward Piurifayne Fountain.

Valentine, not at all sleepy, re-enacted the Metamorph pantomime a hundred times in his mind. It had the quality of a dream, yes, but no dream was so immediate: he had been close enough to touch his Metamorph counterpart; he had seen, beyond all doubt, those shifts of features from fair to dark, dark to fair. The Metamorphs knew the truth, more clearly than he himself. Could they read souls, as Deliamber sometimes did? What had they felt, knowing they had a fallen Coronal in their midst? No awe, certainly: Coronals were nothing to them, mere symbols of their own defeat thousands of years ago. It must have seemed terribly funny to them to have a successor to Lord Stiamot tossing clubs at their festival, amusing them with silly tricks and dances, far from the splendors of Castle Mount, a Coronal in their own muddy wooden village. How strange, he thought. How much like a dream.

—15—

TOWARD DAWN HUGE ROUNDED mountains became visible, with a broad notch between them. Avendroyne could not be far. Zalzan Kavol, with a deference he had never shown before, came aft to consult Valentine on strategy. Lie low in the woods all day, and wait until nightfall to try to get past Avendroyne? Or attempt a bold daylight passage?

Leadership was unfamiliar to Valentine. He pondered a moment, trying to look far-seeing and thoughtful.

At length he said, "If we go forward by day, we are too conspicuous. On the other hand, if we waste all day hiding here, we give them more time to prepare plans against us."

"Tonight," Sleet pointed out, "is the high festival again in Ilirivoyne, and probably here also. We might slip by them while they’re merrymaking, but in daylight we have no chance."

"I agree," said Lisamon Hultin.

Valentine looked around. "Carabella?"

"If we wait, we give the Ilirivoyne people time to overtake us. I say go onward."

"Deliamber?"

The Vroon delicately touched tentacle-tips together. "Onward. Bypass Avendroyne, double back toward Verf. There’ll be a second road to the Fountain from Avendroyne, surely."

"Yes," Valentine said. He looked to Zalzan Kavol. "My thoughts run with Deliamber and Carabella. What of yours?"

Zalzan Kavol scowled. "Mine say, let the wizard make this wagon fly, and take us tonight to Ni-moya. Otherwise, continue on without waiting."

"So be it," said Valentine, as if he had made the decision single-handedly. "And when we approach Avendroyne, we’ll send scouts out to find a road that bypasses the town."

On they went, moving more cautiously as daybreak arrived. The rain was intermittent, but when it came now it was no gentle spatter, more an almost tropical downpour, a heavy cannonade of drops that rattled with malign force against the wagon’s roof. To Valentine the rain was welcome: perhaps it would keep the Metamorphs indoors as they went through.

There were signs of outskirts now, scattered wicker huts. The road forked and forked again, Deliamber offering a guess at each point of division, until finally they knew they must be close to Avendroyne. Lisamon Hultin and Sleet rode out as scouts, and returned in an hour with good news: one of the two roads just ahead ran right into the heart of Avendroyne, where festival preparations were under way, and the other curved toward the northeast, bypassing the city entirely and going through what looked like a farming district on the farther slopes of the mountains.

They took the northeast road. Uneventfully they passed the Avendroyne region.

Now, in late afternoon, they journeyed down the mountain pass and into a broad, thickly forested plain rain-swept and dark, that marked the eastern perimeter of Metamorph territory. Zalzan Kavol drove the wagon furiously onward, pausing only when Shanamir insisted that the mounts absolutely had to rest and forage; virtually tireless they might be, and of synthetic origin, but living things were what they were, and now and then they needed to halt. The Skandar yielded reluctantly; he seemed possessed by desperate need to put Piurifayne far behind him.

Toward twilight, as they went in heavy rain through rough, irregular country, trouble came suddenly upon them.

Valentine was riding in mid-cabin, with Deliamber and Carabella; most of the others were sleeping, and Heitrag Kavol and Gibor Haern were driving. There came a crashing, crackling, smashing sound from ahead, and a moment later the wagon jolted to a stop.

"Tree down in the storm!" Heitrag Kavol called. "Road blocked in front of us!"

Zalzan Kavol muttered curses and tugged Lisamon Hultin awake. Valentine saw nothing but green ahead, the entire crown of some forest giant blocking the road. It might take hours or even days to clear that. The Skandars, hoisting energy-throwers to their shoulders, went out to investigate. Valentine followed. Darkness was falling rapidly. The wind was gusty, and shafts of rain swept almost horizontally into their faces.

"Let’s get to work," Zalzan Kavol growled, shaking his head in annoyance. "Thelkar! You start cutting from down there! Rovorn! The big side branches! Erfon—"

"It might be swifter," Valentine suggested, "to back up and look for another fork in the road."

The idea startled Zalzan Kavol, as if the Skandar would never in a century have conceived such a notion. He mulled it for a moment. "Yes," he said finally. "That does make some sense. If we—"

And a second tree, larger even than the first, toppled to the ground a hundred yards behind them. The wagon was trapped.

Valentine was the first to comprehend what must be happening. "Into the wagon, everyone! It’s an ambush!" He rushed toward the open door

Too late. Out of the darkening forest came a stream of Metamorphs, fifteen or twenty of them, perhaps even more, bursting silently into their midst. Zalzan Kavol let out a terrible cry of rage and opened fire with his energy-thrower; the blaze of light cast a strange lavender glow over the roadside and two Metamorphs fell, charred hideously. But in the same instant Heitrag Kavol uttered a strangled gurgle and dropped, a weapon-shaft through his neck, and Thelkar fell, clutching at another in his chest.

Suddenly the rear end of the wagon was ablaze. Those within came scrambling out, Lisamon Hultin leading the way with her vibration-sword high. Valentine found himself attacked by a Metamorph wearing his own face; he kicked the creature away, pivoted, slashed a second one with the knife that was his only weapon. That was strange, to inflict a wound. In weird fascination, he watched the bronze-hued fluid begin to flow.

The Valentine Metamorph came at him again. Claws went for his eyes. Valentine dodged, twisted, stabbed. The blade sank deep and the Metamorph reeled back, clutching at its chest. Valentine trembled in shock, but only for an instant. He turned to confront the next.

This was a new experience for him, this fighting and killing, and it made his soul ache. But to be gentle now was to invite a quick death. He thrust and cut, thrust and cut. From behind him he heard Carabella call, "How are you doing?"

"Holding — my — own—" he grunted.

Zalzan Kavol, seeing his magnificent wagon on fire, howled and caught a Metamorph by the waist and hurled it into the pyre; two more rushed at him, but another Skandar seized them and snapped them like sticks with each pair of hands. In the frantic melee Valentine caught sight of Carabella wrestling with a Metamorph, forcing it to the ground with the powerful forearm muscles years of juggling had developed; and there was Sleet, ferociously vindictive, pounding another with his boots in savage joy. But the wagon was burning. The wagon was burning. The woods were full of Metamorphs, night was swiftly coming on, the rain was a torrent, and the wagon was burning.

As the heat of the fire increased, the center of the battle shifted from the roadside to the forest, and matters became even more confused, for in the darkness it was hard to tell friend from foe. The Metamorph trick of shapeshifting added another complication, although in the frenzy of the fight they were unable to hold their transformations for long, and what seemed to be Sleet, or Shanamir, or Zalzan Kavol, reverted quickly to its native form.

Valentine fought savagely. He was slippery with his own sweat and the blood of Metamorphs, and his heart hammered mightily with the furious exertion. Panting, gasping, never still an instant, he waded through the tangle of enemies with a zeal that astonished him, never pausing for an instant’s rest. Thrust and cut, thrust and cut—

The Metamorphs were armed with only the simplest of weapons, and, though there seemed to be dozens of them, their numbers soon were dwindling rapidly. Lisamon Hultin was doing awful destruction with her vibration-sword, swinging it two-handed and lopping off the boughs of trees as well as the limbs of Metamorphs. The surviving Skandars, spraying energy-bolts wildly around the scene, had ignited half a dozen trees and had littered the ground with fallen Metamorphs. Sleet was maiming and slaughtering as if he could in one wild minute avenge himself for all the pain he fancied the Metamorphs had brought upon him. Khun and Vinorkis too were fighting with passionate energy.

As suddenly as the ambush had begun, it was over.

By the light of the fires Valentine could see dead Metamorphs everywhere. Two dead Skandars lay among them. Lisamon Hultin bore a bloody but shallow wound on one thigh; Sleet had lost half his jerkin and had taken several minor cuts; Shanamir had clawmarks across his cheek. Valentine too felt some trifling scratches and nicks, and his arms had a leaden ache of fatigue. But he had not been seriously harmed. Deliamber, though — where was Deliamber? The Vroon wizard was nowhere to be seen. In anguish Valentine turned to Carabella and said, "Did the Vroon stay in the wagon?"

"I thought we all came out when it burst afire."

Valentine frowned. In the silence of the forest the only sounds were the terrible hissing and crackling of fire and the quiet mocking patter of the rain. "Deliamber?" Valentine called. "Deliamber, where are you?"

"Here," answered a high-pitched voice from above. Valentine looked up and saw the sorcerer clinging to a sturdy bough, fifteen feet off the ground. "Warfare is not one of my skills," Deliamber explained blandly, swinging outward and letting himself drop into Lisamon Hultin’s arms.

Carabella said, "What do we do now?"

Valentine realized that she was asking him. He was in command. Zalzan Kavol, kneeling by his brothers’ bodies, seemed stunned by their deaths and by the loss of his precious wagon.

He said, "We have no choice but to cut through the forest. If we try to take the main road we’ll meet more Metamorphs. Shanamir, what of the mounts?"

"Dead," the boy sobbed. "Every one. The Metamorphs—"

"On foot, then. A long wet journey it will be, too. Deliamber, how far do you think we are from the River Steiche?"

"A few days’ journey, I suspect. But we have no sure notion of the direction."

"Follow the slope of the land," Sleet said. "Rivers won’t lie uphill from here. If we keep going east we’re bound to hit it."

"Unless a mountain stands in our way," Deliamber remarked.

"We’ll find the river," Valentine said firmly. "The Steiche flows into the Zimr at Ni-moya, is that right?"

"Yes," said Deliamber, "but its flow is turbulent."

"We’ll have to chance it. A raft, I suppose, will be quickest to build. Come. If we stay here much longer we’ll be set upon again."

They could salvage nothing from the wagon, neither clothing nor food nor belongings nor their juggling gear — all lost, every scrap, everything but what had been on them when they came forth to meet the ambushers. To Valentine that was no great loss; but to some of the others, particularly the Skandars, it was overwhelming. The wagon had been their home a long while.

It was difficult to get Zalzan Kavol to move from the spot. He seemed frozen, unable to abandon the bodies of his brothers and the ruin of his wagon. Gently Valentine urged him to his feet. Some of the Metamorphs, he said, might well have escaped in the skirmish; they could soon return with reinforcements; it was perilous to remain here. Quickly they dug shallow graves in the soft forest floor and laid Thelkar and Heitrag Kavol to rest. Then, in steady rain and gathering darkness, they set out in what they hoped was an easterly direction.

For over an hour they walked, until it became too dark to see; then they camped miserably in a little soggy huddle, clinging to one another until dawn. At first light they rose, cold and stiff, and picked their way onward through the tangled forest. The rain, at least, had stopped. The forest here was less of a jungle, and gave them little challenge, except for an occasional swift stream that had to be forded with care. At one of those, Carabella lost her footing and was fished out by Lisamon Hultin; at another it was Shanamir who was swept downstream, and Khun who plucked him to safety. They walked until midday, and rested an hour or two, making a scrappy meal of raw roots and berries. Then they went on until darkness.

And passed two more days in the same fashion.

And on the third came to a grove of dwikka-trees, eight fat squat giants in the forest, with monstrous swollen fruits hanging from them.

"Food!" Zalzan Kavol bellowed.

"Food sacred to the forest-brethren," Lisamon Hultin said. "Be careful!"

The famished Skandar, nevertheless, was on the verge of cutting down one of the enormous fruits with his energy-thrower when Valentine said sharply, "No! I forbid it!"

Zalzan Kavol stared incredulously. For an instant his old habits of command asserted themselves, and he glared at Valentine as if about to strike him. But he kept his temper in check.

"Look," Valentine said.

Forest-brethren were emerging from behind every tree. They were armed with their dart-blowers; and seeing the slender apelike creatures encircling them, Valentine in his weariness felt almost willing to be slain. But only for a moment. He recovered his spirits and said to Lisamon Hultin, "Ask them if we may have food and guides to the Steiche. If they ask a price, we can juggle for them with stones, or pieces of fruit, I suppose."

The warrior-woman, twice as tall as the forest-brethren, went into their midst and talked with them a long time. She was smiling when she returned.

"They are aware," she said, "that we are the ones who freed their brothers in Ilirivoyne!"

"Then we are saved!" cried Shanamir.

"News travels swiftly in this forest," Valentine said.

Lisamon Hultin went on, "We are their guests. They will feed us. They will guide us."

That night the wanderers ate richly on dwikka-fruit and other forest delicacies, and there was actually laughter among them for the first time since the ambush. Afterward the forest-brethren performed a sort of dance for them, a monkeyish prancing thing, and Sleet and Carabella and Valentine responded with impromptu juggling using objects collected in the forest. Afterward Valentine slept a deep, satisfying sleep. In his dreams he had the gift of flight, and saw himself soaring to the summit of Castle Mount.

And in the morning a party of chattering forest-brethren led them to the River Steiche, three hours’ journey from the dwikka-tree grove, and bade them farewell with little twittering cries.

The river was a sobering sight. It was broad, though nothing remotely like the mighty Zimr, and it sped northward with startling haste, flowing so energetically that it had carved out a deep bed bordered in many places by high rocky walls. Here and there ugly stone snags rose above the water, and downstream Valentine could see white eddies of rapids.

The building of rafts took a day and a half. They cut down the young slim trees that grew by the riverbank, trimmed and trued them with knives and sharp stones, lashed them together with vines. The results were hardly elegant, but the rafts, though crude, did look reasonably riverworthy. There were three altogether — one for the four Skandars, one for Khun, Vinorkis, Lisamon Hultin, and Sleet, and one occupied by Valentine, Carabella, Shanamir, and Deliamber.

"We will probably become separated as we go downriver," Sleet said. "We should choose a meeting-place in Ni-moya."

Deliamber said, "The Steiche and the Zimr flow together at a place called Nissimorn. There is a broad, sandy beach there. Let us meet at Nissimorn Beach."

"At Nissimorn Beach, yes," Valentine said. He cut loose the cord that bound his raft to the shore, and was carried off into the river.

The first day’s journey was uneventful. There were rapids, but not difficult ones, and they poled safely past them. Carabella showed skill at handling the raft, and deftly steered them around the occasional rocky patches.

After a time the rafts became separated, Valentine’s taking some subcurrent and moving rapidly ahead of the other two. In the morning he waited, hoping the others would catch up. But there was no sign of them and eventually he decided to depart.

On, on, on, for the most part swept easily along, with occasional moments of anxiety in the white-water stretches. By afternoon of the second day the course was becoming rougher. The land seemed to dip here, sloping downward as the Zimr drew near, and the river, following the line of descent, plunged and bucked. Valentine began to worry about waterfalls ahead. They had no charts, no notion of dangers: they took everything as it came. He could only trust to luck that this swift water would deliver them safely to Ni-moya.

And then? By boat to Piliplok, and by pilgrim-ship to the Isle of Sleep, and somehow procure an interview with the Lady his mother, and then? And then? How did one claim the Coronal’s throne, when one’s face was not the face of Lord Valentine the rightful ruler? By what claim, by what authority? It seemed to Valentine an impossible quest. He might be better remaining here in the forest, ruling over his little band. They, readily enough, accepted him for what he thought himself to be; but in that world of billions of strangers, in that vast empire of giant cities that lay beyond the horizon, how, how would he ever manage to convince the unbelievers that he, Valentine the juggler, was—

No. These thoughts were foolish. He had never, not since he had appeared, shorn of memory and past, on the verge overlooking Pidruid, felt the need to rule over others; and if he had come to command this little group, it was more by natural gift and by Zalzan Kavol’s default than out of any overt desire on his part. And yet he was in command, however tentatively and delicately. So it would be as he traveled onward through Majipoor. He would take one step at a time, and do that which seemed right and proper, and perhaps the Lady would guide him, and if the Divine so willed it he would one day stand again on Castle Mount, and if that was not part of the great plan, why, that would be acceptable also. There was nothing to fear. The future would unroll serenely in its own true course, as it had done since Pidruid. And—

"Valentine!" Carabella shouted.

The river seemed to sprout giant stony teeth. There were boulders everywhere, and monstrous white whirlpools, and, just ahead, an ominous tumbling descent, a place where the Steiche leaped out into space and went roaring down a series of steps to a valley far below. Valentine gripped his pole, but no pole could help him now. It lodged between two snags and was ripped from his grasp; a moment later there was a ghastly grinding sound as the flimsy raft, battered by submerged rocks, swung around at right angles to its course and split apart. He was hurled into the chilly stream and swept forward like a cork. For a moment he grasped Carabella by the wrist; but then the current pulled her free, and as he clutched desperately for her he was engulfed by the swift water and driven under.

Gasping and choking, Valentine struggled to get his head above water. When he did, he was already far downstream. The wreckage of the raft was nowhere in sight.

"Carabella?" he yelled. "Shanamir? Deliamber? Hoy! Hoy!"

He roared until his voice was ragged, but the booming of the rapids so thoroughly covered his cries that he could scarcely hear them himself. A terrible sense of pain and loss numbed his spirit. All gone, then? His friends, his beloved Carabella, the wily little Vroon, the clever, cocky boy Shanamir, all swept to death in an instant? No. No. Unthinkable. That was an agony far worse than this business, still unreal to him, of being a Coronal thrust from the Castle. What did that mean? These were beings of flesh and blood, dear to him; that was only a title and power. He would not stop calling their names as the river threw him about. "Carabella!" he shouted. "Shanamir!"

Valentine clawed at rocks, trying to halt his willy-nilly descent, but he was in the heart of the rapids now, buffeted and battered by the current and by the stones of the riverbed. Dazed and exhausted, half paralyzed by grief, Valentine gave up struggling and let himself be carried, down the giant staircase of the river, a tiny plaything spinning and bouncing along. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms over his head, attempting to minimize the surface he presented to the rocks. The power of the river was awesome. So here is how it ends, he thought, the grand adventure of Valentine of Majipoor, once Coronal, later wandering juggler, now about to be broken to bits by the impersonal and uncaring forces of nature. He commended himself to the Lady whom he thought to be his mother, and gulped air, and went heels over head, head over heels, down and down and down, and struck something with frightening force and thought this must be the end, only it was not the end, and struck something again that gave him an agonizing blow in the ribs, knocking the air from him, and he must have lost consciousness for a time, for he felt no further pain.

And then he found himself lying on a pebble-strewn strand, in a quiet sidestream of the river. It seemed to him that he had been shaken in a giant dice-box for hours, and cast up at random, discarded and useless. His body ached in a thousand places. His lungs felt soggy when he breathed. He was shivering and his skin was covered with goosebumps. And he was alone, under a vast cloudless sky, at the edge of some unknown wilderness, with civilization some unknown distance ahead and his friends perhaps dashed to death on the boulders.

But he was alive. That much was sure. Alone, battered, helpless, grief-stricken, lost . . . but alive. The adventure, then, was not ended. Slowly, with infinite effort, Valentine hauled himself out of the surf and tottered to the riverbank, and let himself carefully down on a wide flat rock, and with numb fingers undid his clothing and stretched out to dry himself under the warm friendly sun. He looked toward the river, hoping to see Carabella come swimming along, or Shanamir with the wizard perched on his shoulder. No one. But that doesn’t mean they’re dead, he told himself. They may have been cast up on farther shores. I’ll rest here for a time, Valentine resolved, and then I’ll go searching for the others, and then, with them or without, I’ll set out onward, toward Ni-moya, toward Piliplok, toward the Isle of the Lady, onward, onward, onward toward Castle Mount or whatever else lies ahead for me. Onward. Onward. Onward.