Lord Valentine's Castle

—1—

FOR WHAT FELT LIKE MONTHS or perhaps years Valentine lay sprawled naked on his warm flat rock on the pebbly beach where the unruly River Steiche had deposited him. The roar of the river was a constant drone in his ears, oddly soothing. The sunlight enfolded him in a hazy golden nimbus, and he told himself that its touch would heal his bruises and abrasions and contusions, if only he lay still long enough. Vaguely he knew he ought to rise and see about shelter, and begin to search for his companions, but he barely could find the strength to turn from one side to the other.

This was no way, he knew, for a Coronal of Majipoor to conduct himself. Such self-indulgence might be acceptable for merchants or tavernkeepers or even jugglers, but a higher discipline rested upon one who had pretensions to govern. Therefore get to your feet, he told himself, and clothe your body, and start walking northward along the riverbank until you reach those who can help you regain your lofty place. Yes. Up, Valentine! But he remained where he was. He had expended every scrap of energy in him. Coronal or not, during the helter-skelter plunge down the rapids. Lying here like this, he had a powerful sense of the immensity of Majipoor, its many thousands of miles of circumference stretching out beneath his limbs, a planet large enough comfortably to house twenty billion people without crowding, a planet of enormous cities and wondrous parks and forest preserves and sacred districts and agricultural territories, and it seemed to him that if he took the trouble to rise it would be necessary for him to cover all that colossal domain on foot, step by step by step. It seemed simpler to stay where he was.

Something tickled the small of his back, something rubbery and insistent. He ignored it.

"Valentine?"

He ignored that too, for a moment.

The tickling occurred again but by then it had filtered through his fatigue-dulled brain that someone had spoken his name, and therefore that one of his companions must have survived after all. Joy flooded his soul. With what little energy he could muster, Valentine raised his head and saw the small many-limbed figure of Autifon Deliamber standing beside him. The Vroonish wizard was about to prod him a third time.

"You’re alive!" Valentine cried.

"Evidently I am. And so are you, more or less."

"And Carabella? Shanamir?"

"I have not seen them."

"As I feared," Valentine murmured dully. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, and in leaden despair lay once more like jetsam.

"Come," Deliamber said. "There is a vast journey ahead of us."

"I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up."

"Are you hurt?"

"I don’t think so. But I want to rest, Deliamber. I want to rest a hundred years."

The sorcerer’s tentacles probed and poked Valentine in a dozen places. "No serious damage," the Vroon murmured. "Much of you is still healthy."

"Much of me isn’t," said Valentine indistinctly. "What about you?"

"Vroons are good swimmers, even old ones like me. I am unhurt. We should go on, Valentine."

"Later."

"Is this how a Coronal of Majip—"

"No," Valentine said. "But a Coronal of Majipoor would not have had to shoot the Steiche rapids on a slapped-together log raft. A Coronal would not have been wandering in this wilderness for days and days, sleeping in the rain and eating nothing but nuts and berries. A Coronal—"

"A Coronal would not allow his lieutenants to see him in a condition of indolence and spiritlessness," Deliamber said sharply. "And one of them is approaching right now."

Valentine blinked and sat up, Lisamon Hultin was striding along the beach toward them. She looked a trifle disarranged, her clothing in shreds, her gigantic fleshy body purpled with bruises here and there, but her pace was jaunty and her voice, when she called out to them, was as booming as ever.

"Hoy! Are you intact?"

"I think so," Valentine answered. "Have you seen any others?"

"Carabella and the boy, half a mile or so back that way."

He felt his spirits soar. "Are they all right?"

"She is, at any rate."

"And Shanamir?"

"Doesn’t want to wake up. She sent me out to look for the sorcerer. Found him sooner than I thought. Phaugh, what a river! That raft came apart so fast it was almost funny!"

Valentine reached for his clothing, found it still wet, and, with a shrug, dropped it to the rocks. "We must get to Shanamir at once. Have you news of Khun and Sleet and Vinorkis?"

"Didn’t see them. I went into the river and when I came up I was alone."

"And the Skandars?"

"No sign of them at all." To Deliamber she said, "Where do you think we are, wizard?"

"Far from anywhere," the Vroon replied. "Safely out of the Metamorph lands, at any rate. Come, take me to the boy."

Lisamon Hultin scooped Deliamber to her shoulder and strode back along the beach, while Valentine limped along behind them, carrying his damp clothing over his arm. After a time they came upon Carabella and Shanamir camped in an inlet of bright white sand surrounded by thick river-reeds with scarlet stems. Carabella, battered and weary-looking, wore only a brief leather skirt. But she seemed in reasonably good shape. Shanamir lay unconscious, breathing slowly, his skin an odd dark hue.

"Oh, Valentine!" Carabella cried, springing up and running to him. "I saw you swept away — and then — and then — Oh, I thought I’d never see you again!"

He held her close against him. "And I thought the same. I thought you were lost to me forever, love."

"Were you hurt?"

"Not permanently," he said. "And you?"

"I was tossed and tossed and tossed until I couldn’t remember my own name. But then I found a calm place and I swam to shore, and Shanamir was already there. But he wouldn’t wake up. And Lisamon came out of the underbrush and said she’d try to find Deliamber, and — Will he be all right, wizard?"

"In a moment," said Deliamber, arranging his tentacle-tips over the boy’s chest and forehead, as if making some transfer of energy. Shanamir grunted and stirred. His eyes opened tentatively, closed, opened again. In a thick voice he began to say something, but Deliamber told him to be silent, to lie still, to let the strength flow back into him.

There was no question of attempting to move on that afternoon. Valentine and Carabella constructed a crude shelter out of reeds; Lisamon Hultin assembled a meager dinner of raw fruit and young pininna-sprouts; and they sat in silence beside the river, watching a spectacular sunset, bands of violet and gold streaking the great dome of the sky, reflections in luminous tones of orange and purple in the water, undertones of pale green, satiny red, silken crimson, and then the first puffs of gray and black, the swift descent of night.

In the morning they all felt able to proceed, though stiff from a night in the open. Shanamir showed no ill effects: Deliamber’s care and the natural resilience of youth had restored his vitality.

Patching together their clothing as best they could, they set out to the north, following the beach until it gave out, then continuing through the forest of gawky androdragma-trees and flowering alabandina that flanked the river. The air was soft and mild here, and the sun, descending in dappled splotches through the treetops, gave a welcome warmth to the weary stragglers.

In the third hour of the march Valentine caught the scent of fire just ahead, and what smelled very much like the aroma of grilled fish. He jogged forward, salivating, prepared to buy, beg, if necessary steal, some of that fish, for it had been more days than he cared to count since he had last tasted cooked food. Down a rough talus slope he skidded, into sunlight on white pebbles, so bright he could barely see. In the glare he made out three figures crouched over a fire by the river’s edge, and when he shaded his eyes he discovered that one was a compact human with pale skin and a startling shock of white hair, and another was a long-legged blue-skinned being of alien birth, and the third a Hjort.

"Sleet!" Valentine cried. "Khun! Vinorkis!"

He ran toward them, slipping and sliding over the rocks.

They watched his wild approach calmly, and when he was close by them Sleet, in a casual manner, handed him a stake on which was spitted a fillet of some pink-fleshed river fish.

"Have some lunch," Sleet said amiably.

Valentine gaped. "How did you get so far ahead of us? What did you build this fire with? How did you catch the fish? What have you—"

"Your fish will get cold," Khun said. "Eat first, questions after."

Valentine took a hasty bite — he had never tasted anything so delicious, a tender moist meat splendidly seared, surely as elegant a morsel as had ever been served in the feasts on Castle Mount — and, turning, called to his companions to come down the slope. But they were already on their way, Shanamir whooping and cavorting as he ran, Carabella gracefully darting over the rocks, Lisamon Hultin, bearing Deliamber, pounding thunderously toward him. "There’s fish for all!" Sleet proclaimed. They had caught at least a dozen, which circled sadly in a shallow rock-rimmed pool near the fire. Efficiently Khun plucked them forth and split and gutted them. Sleet held them briefly over the flame and passed them to the others, who ate ravenously.

Sleet explained that when their raft had broken up they had found themselves clinging to a fragment some three logs wide, and had managed to hang on all the way through the rapids and far downstream. They vaguely remembered having seen the beach where Valentine was cast ashore, but they had not noticed him on it as they passed by, and they had drifted another few miles before they had recovered enough from their rapids-running to want to let go of their logs and swim to the bank. Khun had caught the fish bare-handed: he had, said Sleet, the quickest hands he had ever seen, and would probably make a magnificent juggler. Khun grinned — the first time Valentine had seen anything but a grim expression on his face.

"And the fire?" Carabella asked. "You started it by snapping your fingers, I suppose?"

"We attempted it," Sleet answered smoothly. "But it proved to be strenuous work. So we walked over to the village of fisherfolk just beyond the bend and asked to borrow a light."

"Fisherfolk?" Valentine said, startled. "An outpost of Liimen," said Sleet, "who evidently don’t know that it’s their racial destiny to sell sausages in the western cities. They gave us shelter last night, and have agreed to ferry us up to Ni-moya this afternoon, so that we can wait for our friends at Nissimorn Beach." He smiled. "I suppose we’ll need to hire a second boat now."

Deliamber said, "Are we that close to Ni-moya?"

"Two hours by boat, so I’m told, to the place where the rivers flow together."

Suddenly the world seemed less huge to Valentine, and the chores that awaited him less overwhelming. To have eaten a real meal once again, and to know that a friendly settlement lay nearby, and that he would soon be leaving the wilderness behind, was tremendously cheering. Only one thing troubled him now: the fate of Zalzan Kavol and his three surviving brothers.

The Liiman village was indeed close at hand — perhaps five hundred souls, short flat-headed dark-skinned people whose triple sets of bright fiery eyes regarded the wanderers with little curiosity. They lived in modest thatched huts close beside the river, and raised an assortment of crops in small gardens to supplement the catch that their fleet of crude fishing-boats brought in. Their dialect was a difficult one, but Sleet seemed able to communicate with them and managed to arrange not only another boat but also the purchase, for a couple of crowns, of fresh clothing for Carabella and Lisamon Hultin.

In early afternoon they set out, with four taciturn Liimen as their crew, on the journey to Ni-moya.

The river ran as swift as ever here, but there were few rapids of any consequence, and the two boats sped nicely along through countryside increasingly populous and tame. The steep riverbanks of the uplands gave way, down here, to broad alluvial plains of heavy black silt, and shortly an almost continuous strip of farming villages appeared.

Now the river widened and grew calm, becoming a broad, even waterway with a deep blue glint. The land here was flat and open, and though the settlements on both sides were doubtless goodly cities with populations of many thousands, they seemed mere hamlets, so dwarfed were they by the gigantic surroundings. Ahead lay a dark, immense headwater that seemed to span the entire horizon as though it were the open sea.

"River Zimr," announced the Liiman at the helm of Valentine’s boat. "Steiche ends here. Nissimorn Beach on left."

Valentine beheld a huge crescent strand, bordered by a dense grove of palm trees of a peculiarly lopsided shape, purplish fronds jutting up like ruffled feathers. As they drew near, Valentine was startled to see a raft of crudely trimmed logs on the beach, and, sitting beside it, four giant shaggy four-armed figures. The Skandars were waiting for them.

—2—

ZALZAN KAVOL SAW NOTHING extraordinary about his voyage. His raft had come to the rapids; he and his brothers had poled their way through, getting jounced about a little, but not seriously; they had continued on downstream to Nissimorn Beach, where they had camped in growing impatience, wondering what was delaying the rest of the party. It had not occurred to the Skandar that the other rafts might have been wrecked in the passage, nor had he seen any of the castaways along the riverbank en route. "Did you have trouble?" he asked in what seemed to be genuine innocence.

"Of a minor sort," Valentine replied dryly. "But we seem to be reunited, and it will be good to sleep in proper lodgings again tonight."

They resumed the journey, and presently they passed into the great confluence of the Steiche and the Zimr, a water so wide that it was impossible for Valentine to conceive it as the mere meeting-place of two rivers. At the town of Nissimorn on the southwestern shore they parted from the Liimen and boarded the ferry that would take them on across to Ni-moya, largest of the cities of the continent of Zimroel.

Thirty million citizens dwelled here. At Ni-moya the River Zimr made a great bend, changing its course sharply from easterly to southeasterly. There a prodigious megalopolis had taken form. It spread for hundreds of miles along both banks of the river and up several tributaries that flowed in from the north. Valentine and his companions saw first the southern suburbs, residential districts that gave way, in the extreme south, to the agricultural territory stretching down into the Steiche Valley. The main urban zone lay on the north bank, and could only dimly be seen at first, tier upon tier of flat-topped white towers descending toward the river. Ferries by the dozens plied the water here, linking the myriad riverside towns. The crossing took several hours, and twilight was beginning before Ni-moya proper was clearly in view.

The city looked magical. Its lights, just coming on, sparkled invitingly against the backdrop of heavily forested green hills and impeccable white buildings. Giant fingers of piers thrust into the river, and an astounding bustle of vessels great and small lined the waterfront. Pidruid, which had seemed so mighty to Valentine in his early days of wandering, was a minor city indeed compared with this.

Only the Skandars, Khun, and Deliamber had seen Ni-moya before. Deliamber spoke of the city’s marvels: its Gossamer Galleria, a mercantile arcade a mile long, raised above the ground on nearly invisible cables; its Park of Fabulous Beasts, where the rarest of Majipoor’s fauna, those creatures brought closest to extinction by the spread of civilization, roved in surroundings approximating their natural habitats; its Crystal Boulevard, a glittering street of revolving reflectors that awed the eye; its Grand Bazaar, fifteen square miles of mazelike passageways housing uncountable thousands of tiny shops under continuous roofs of dazzling yellow sparklecloth; its Museum of Worlds, its Chamber of Sorcery, its Ducal Palace, built on a heroic scale said to be surpassed only by Lord Valentine’s Castle, and many other things that sounded, to Valentine, more like the stuff of myth and fantasy than anything one might encounter in a real city.

But they would see none of these things. The thousand-instrument municipal orchestra, the floating restaurants, the artificial birds with jeweled eyes, and all the rest would have to wait until, if ever the day came, he returned to Ni-moya in a Coronal’s robes.

As the ferry neared the slip Valentine called everyone together and said, "Now we must determine our individual courses. I mean to take passage here for Piliplok, and make my way from there to the Isle. I’ve prized your companionship this far, and I would have it even longer, but I can offer you nothing except endless journeying and the possibility of an early death. My hope of success is slight and the obstacles are formidable. Will any of you continue with me?"

"To the other side of the world!" Shanamir cried.

"And I," said Sleet, and Vinorkis the same.

"Would you have doubted me?" Carabella asked.

Valentine smiled. He looked to Deliamber, who said, "The sanctity of the realm is at stake. How could I not follow the rightful Coronal wherever he asks?"

"This mystifies me," Lisamon Hultin said. "I understand none of this business of a Coronal roaming out of his proper body. But I have no other employment, Valentine. I am with you."

"I thank you all," Valentine said. "I will thank you again, and more grandly, in the feasting-hall on Castle Mount."

Zalzan Kavol said, "And have you no use for Skandars, my lord?"

Valentine had not expected that. "Will you come?"

"Our wagon is lost. Our brotherhood is broken by death. We are without our juggling gear. I feel no calling to be a pilgrim, but I will follow you to the Isle and beyond, and so also will my brothers, if you want us."

"I want you, Zalzan Kavol. Is there such a post as juggler to the royal court? You will have it, I promise!"

"Thank you, my lord," said the Skandar gravely.

"There is one more volunteer," said Khun.

"You too?" Valentine said in surprise.

The dour alien replied, "It matters little to me who is king of this planet where I am stranded. But it matters much to me to behave honorably. I would be dead now in Piurifayne but for you. I owe you my life and I will give you such aid as I can."

Valentine shook his head. "We did for you only what any civilized being would do for any other. No debt exists."

"I see it otherwise. Besides," said Khun, "my life until now has been trivial and shallow. I left my native Kianimot for no good reason to come here, and I lived foolishly here and nearly paid with my life, and why go on as I have been doing? I will join your cause and make it mine, and perhaps I will come to believe in it, or feel that I do, and if I die to make you king, it will only even the debt between us. With a death well accomplished I can repay the universe for a life poorly spent. Can you use me?"

"With all my heart I welcome you," Valentine said.

The ferry released a grand blast of its horn and glided smoothly into its slip.

They stayed the night at the cheapest waterfront hotel they could find, a clean but stark place of whitewashed stone walls and communal tubs, and treated themselves to a modestly lavish dinner at an inn nearby. Valentine called for a pooling of funds and appointed Shanamir and Zalzan Kavol joint treasurers, since they seemed to have the finest appreciation of the value and uses of money. Valentine himself had much remaining of the funds he had had in Pidruid, and Zalzan Kavol produced from a hidden pouch a surprising stack of ten-royal pieces. Together they had enough to get them all to the Isle of Sleep.

In the morning they bought passage aboard a riverboat similar to the one that had carried them from Khyntor to Verf, and began their voyage to Piliplok, the great port at the mouth of the Zimr.

For all they had traveled across the face of Zimroel, some thousands of miles still separated them from the east coast. But on the broad breast of the Zimr vessels moved swiftly and serenely. Of course, the riverboat stopped again and again at the innumerable towns and cities of the river, Larnimisculus and Belka and Clarischanz, Flegit, Hiskuret, Centriun, Obliorn Vale, Salvamot, Gourkaine, Semirod and Cerinor and Haunfort Major, Impemond, Orgeliuse, Dambemuir, and many more, an unending flow of nearly indistinguishable places, each with its piers, its waterfront promenades, its planting of palms and alabandinas, its gaily painted warehouses and sprawling bazaars, its ticket-clutching passengers eager to come on board and impatient for departure once they had ascended the ramp. Sleet whittled juggling clubs out of some scraps of wood he begged from the crew, and Carabella found balls somewhere to juggle, and at meals the Skandars quietly palmed dishware and slipped it out of sight, so that the troupe gradually accumulated implements to work with, and from the third day on they earned some extra crowns by performing on the plaza-deck. Zalzan Kavol gradually regained some of his old gruff self-assurance now that he was performing again, although he still was oddly subdued, his soul moving on tiptoe through situations that once would have called forth angry storms.

This was the native territory of the four Skandars, who had been born in Piliplok and began their careers on circuit through the inland towns of the huge province, ranging as far upriver as Stenwamp and Port Saikforge, a thousand miles from the coast. This familiar countryside brightened them, these rolling tawny hills and bustling little cities of wooden buildings, and Zalzan Kavol spoke lengthily of his early career here, his successes and failures — very few of those — and of a dispute with an impresario that led him to seek fortune at the other end of Zimroel. Valentine suspected that there was some violence involved, perhaps some embroilment with the law, but he asked no questions.

One night after much wine the Skandars even broke into song, for the first time in Valentine’s time with them — a Skandar song, mournful and lugubrious, sung in a minor key as the singers shuffled about and about in a slump-shouldered circling march:

The song was so unrelievedly gloomy, and the enormous Skandars looked so absurd as they lurched about chanting it, that it was all that Valentine and Carabella could do to hold back laughter at first. But by the second chorus Valentine actually found himself moved by it, for there seemed real emotion in the song: the Skandars had met death and woe, and though they were close to home now, they had spent much of their lives far from Piliplok; and perhaps, Valentine thought, it was a harsh and painful thing to be a Skandar on Majipoor, a shaggy-pelted creature moving ponderously in the warm air among smaller and sleeker beings.

The summer now was over, and in eastern Zimroel it was the dry season, when warm winds blew from the south, vegetation went dormant until the spring rains, and, so said Zalzan Kavol, tempers became short and crimes of passion common. Valentine found this region less interesting than the jungles of the mid-continent or the subtropic floribundance of the far west, though he decided after a few days of close observation that it did have a certain austere beauty of its own, restrained and severe, quite unlike the riotous lushness of the west. All the same, he was pleased and relieved when, after day upon day on this changeless and seemingly unending river, Zalzan Kavol announced that the outskirts of Piliplok were in view.

—3—

PILIPLOK WAS ABOUT AS OLD and about as large as its counterpart port on the farther shore of the continent, Pidruid; but the resemblance went no deeper. For Pidruid had been built without a plan, a random tangle of streets and avenues and boulevards winding around one another according to whim, whereas Piliplok had been laid out, untold thousands of years ago, with rigid, almost maniacal, precision.

It occupied a promontory of great magnitude on the southern shore of the mouth of the Zimr. The river here was of inconceivable width, sixty or seventy miles across at the point where it flowed into the Inner Sea, and carrying the burden of silt and debris accumulated in all its swift seven-thousand-mile flow out of the far northwest, it stained the blue-green waters of the ocean with a dark tinge that, it was said, could be seen hundreds of miles out. The north headland at the river-mouth was a chalk cliff a mile high and many miles wide, which even from Piliplok was visible on a clear day, a shining white wall dazzling in the morning light. There was nothing over there that could in any way be used as a harbor, and so it had never been settled, but was set aside as a holy preserve. Devotees of the Lady lived there in a withdrawal from the world so total that no one had intruded on them in a hundred years. But Piliplok was another matter: eleven million people occupying a city that radiated in stern spokes from its magnificent natural harbor, A series of curving bands crossed the axis of these spokes, the inner ones mercantile, then zones of industry and recreation, and in the outer reaches the residential neighborhoods, fairly sharply delimited by levels of wealth and to a lesser degree by race. There was a heavy concentration of Skandars in Piliplok — it seemed to Valentine that every third person on the waterfront belonged to Zalzan Kavol’s people — and it was a little intimidating to see so many giant hairy four-armers swaggering about. Here, too, lived many of the aloof and aristocratic two-headed Su-Suheris folk, dealers in luxury commodities, fine fabrics and jewelry and the rarest handicrafts of every province. The air here was crisp and dry, and, feeling the unyielding southerly wind hot against his cheeks, Valentine began to understand what Zalzan Kavol had meant about the short tempers kindled by that wind.

"Does it ever stop blowing?" he asked.

"On the first day of spring," said Zalzan Kavol.

Valentine hoped to be elsewhere by then. But a problem immediately appeared. With Zalzan Kavol and Deliamber he went to Shkunibor Pier at the eastern end of Piliplok harbor to arrange transport to the Isle. For months now Valentine had imagined himself in this city and at that pier, and it had taken on an almost legendary glamour in his mind, a place of vast perspectives and sweeping architecture; and so it disappointed him more than a little to get there and find that the chief place of embarkation for the pilgrim-ships was a ramshackle, dilapidated structure, peeling green paint on its sides, tattered banners flapping in the wind.

Worse was in store. The pier seemed deserted. After some prowling Zalzan Kavol found a departure schedule posted in a dark corner of the ticket house. Pilgrim-ships sailed for the Isle the first of every month — except in autumn, when sailings were spaced more widely because of prevailing unfavorable winds. The last ship of the season had departed a week ago Saturday. The next left in three months.

"Three months!" Valentine cried. "What will we do in Piliplok for three months? Juggle in the streets? Beg? Steal? Read the schedule again, Zalzan Kavol!"

"It will say the same," the Skandar declared. He grimaced. "I am fond of Piliplok beyond any place, but I have no love for it at wind-time. What foul luck!"

"Do no ships at all sail in this season?" Valentine asked.

"Only the dragon-ships," said Zalzan Kavol.

"And what are they?"

"Fishing vessels, that prey on the sea-dragons, which come together in herds to mate at this time of year, and are easily taken. Plenty of dragon-ships set forth now. But what use are they to us?"

"How far out to sea do they go?" Valentine asked.

"As far as they must to make their catch. Sometimes as far as the Rodamaunt Archipelago, if the dragons are swarming easterly."

"Where is that?"

Deliamber said, "It is a long chain of islands far out in the Inner Sea, perhaps midway from here to the Isle of Sleep."

"Inhabited?"

"Quite heavily."

"Good. Surely there’s commerce between islands, then. What if we hire one of these dragon-ships to take us on as passengers, and carry us as far as the Archipelago, and there we commission some local captain to transport us to the Isle?"

"Possibly," Deliamber said.

"There’s no rule requiring all pilgrims to arrive by pilgrim-ship?"

"None that I know of," said the Vroon.

"The dragon-ships will not care to bother with passengers," Zalzan Kavol objected. "They never carry any such trade."

"Would a few royals arouse their interest in doing so?"

The Skandar looked doubtful. "I have no idea. Their trade’s a lucrative one as it is. They might consider passengers a nuisance, or even bad luck. Nor would they necessarily agree to haul us out to the Archipelago, if it happens to lie beyond this year’s hunting track. Nor can we be sure, even if we do reach the Archipelago, that anyone there would be willing to carry us farther."

"On the other hand," Valentine said, "it might all be quite easy to arrange. We have money, and I’d rather use it persuading sea-captains to give us passage than spend it on lodgings and food for the next three months in Piliplok. Where can we find the dragon-hunters?"

An entire section of the waterfront spanning three or four miles was set apart for their use, pier after pier after pier, and there were dozens of the huge wooden vessels in harbor, being outfitted for the new hunting season just beginning. The dragon-ships were of one design, and an ominous and morbid one it was, Valentine thought, for they were great bloated things with flaring outbellying hulls and enormous fanciful three-pronged masts, and terrifying toothy figureheads at their prows and long spiky tails at their sterns. Most were decorated along their flanks with bold scarlet-and-yellow eye-patterns or rapacious-looking rows of white teeth; and high abovedecks were bristling cupolas for the harpooners and mammoth winches for the nets, and bloodstained platforms where the butchering took place. To Valentine it was incongruous to make use of such a killer-vessel in reaching the peaceful and holy Isle of Sleep. But he had no other way.

And even this way soon began to seem doubtful. From ship to ship they went, from wharf to wharf, from drydock to drydock, and the dragon-captains listened without interest to their proposal and made swift refusals. Zalzan Kavol did most of the speaking, for the captains were mainly Skandars and might give sympathetic ear to one of their own kind. But no persuasion would sway them.

"You would be a distraction to the crew," said the first captain. "Forever stumbling over gear, getting seasick, making special requests for service—"

"We are not chartered to carry passengers," said the second. "The rules are strict."

"The Archipelago lies south of our preferred waters," the third declared.

"I have long believed," said the fourth, "that a dragon-ship that goes to sea with strangers to the guild on board is a ship that will never return to Piliplok. I choose not to test that superstition this year."

"Pilgrims are no concern of mine," the fifth told them. "Let the Lady waft you to the Isle, if she will. You won’t get there aboard my ship."

The sixth also refused, adding that no captain was likely to aid them. The seventh said the same. The eighth, having heard that a party of drylanders was wandering the decks looking for passage, refused even to speak with them.

The ninth captain, a grizzled old Skandar with gaps in her teeth and faded fur, was more friendly than the others, though just as unwilling to make room for them on her vessel. She did, at least, have a suggestion. "On Prestimion Pier," she said, "you will find Captain Gorzval of the Brangalyn. Gorzval has made several unlucky voyages and is known to be short of funds; I heard him in a tavern just the other night trying to arrange a loan to pay for repairs to his hull. It may be that some extra revenue from passengers would be useful to him now."

"And where is Prestimion Pier?" Zalzan Kavol asked. "The farthest in this line, beyond Dekkeret and Kinniken, just west of the salvage-yard."

A berth close by the salvage-yard seemed appropriate for the Brangalyn, Valentine thought bleakly an hour later, upon having his first view of Captain Gorzval’s vessel. It looked about ready to be broken up for scrap. It was a smaller and older ship than the others he had seen, and at some point in its long history it must have suffered a staved hull, for in its rebuilding it had become malproportioned, with mismatched timbers and an oddly sloping look to starboard. The painted eyes and teeth along the waterline had lost their luster; the figurehead was awry; the tailspikes had been snapped off eight or ten feet from their mountings, perhaps in a petulant swipe by an angry dragon; the masts had lost some of their yards also. Crewmen with a sluggish and dispirited look to them were at work, but not in any very effective way, caulking and coiling ropes and mending sail.

Captain Gorzval himself seemed as weary and worn as his vessel. He was a Skandar not quite as tall as Lisamon Hultin — virtually a dwarf among his race — with a cast in one eye and a stump where his outer left arm should be. His fur was matted and coarse; his shoulders were slumped; his entire look was one of fatigue and defeat. But he brightened immediately at Zalzan Kavol’s query about taking passengers to the Rodamaunt Archipelago. "How many?"

"Twelve. Four Skandars, a Hjort, a Vroon, five humans, and one — other."

"All pilgrims, you say?"

"All pilgrims."

Gorzval made the sign of the Lady in a perfunctory way and said, "You know it’s irregular for passengers to travel on a dragon-ship. But I owe the Lady recompense for past favors received. I’m willing to make an exception. Cash in advance?"

"Of course," said Zalzan Kavol.

Valentine quickly released his breath. This was a miserable dilapidated ship, and Gorzval probably a third-rate navigator dogged by bad fortune or even downright incompetence; nevertheless, he was willing to take them, and no one else would even entertain the idea.

Gorzval named his price and waited, with obvious tension, to be haggled with. What he asked was less than half what they had unsuccessfully offered the other captains. Zalzan Kavol, bargaining out of habit and pride, no doubt, attempted to cut three royals from that. Gorzval, plainly dismayed, offered a reduction of a royal and a half; Zalzan Kavol appeared ready to shave another few crowns, but Valentine, pitying the hapless captain, cut in quickly to say, "Done. When do we sail?"

"In three days," Gorzval said.

It turned out to be four, actually — Gorzval spoke vaguely of some need for additional refitting, by which he meant. Valentine discovered, patching of some fairly serious leaks. He had not been able to afford it until his passengers had hired on. According to the gossip in the dockside taverns, Lisamon Hultin reported, Gorzval had been trying to mortgage part of his catch to raise the money for carpenters, but found no takers. He had, she said, a doubtful reputation: his judgment was inferior, his luck poor, his crew ill-paid and shiftless. Once he had missed the sea-dragon swarm entirely and returned empty to Piliplok; on another voyage he had lost his arm to a lively little dragon not quite as dead as he thought; and on this last one the Brangalyn had been struck amidships by an irritated beast and nearly sent to the bottom. "We might do better," Lisamon Hultin suggested, "by trying to swim to the Isle."

"Possibly we’ll bring our captain better luck than he’s had," said Valentine.

Sleet laughed. "If optimism alone could carry one to the throne, my lord, you’d be on Castle Mount by Winterday."

Valentine laughed with him. But after the disaster in Piurifayne he hoped he was not leading these folk into new catastrophe aboard this ill-favored vessel. They were following him, after all, on faith alone, on the evidence of dreams and wizardry and an enigmatic Metamorph prank: it would be shame and pain for him if, in his haste to reach the Isle, he caused them more grief. Yet Valentine felt powerful sympathy for the bedraggled stump-armed Gorzval. An unlucky mariner he might be — but a fitting helmsman, perhaps, for a Coronal so frowned upon by fortune that he had managed to lose throne and memory and identity all in a single night!

On the eve of the Brangalyn’s departure Vinorkis drew Valentine aside and said in a troubled tone, "My lord, we are being watched."

"How do you know?"

The Hjort smiled and preened his orange mustachios. "When one has done a little spying, one recognizes the traits in others. I’ve noticed a grayish Skandar lounging around the docks these past few days, asking questions of Gorzval’s people. One of the ship’s carpenters told me he was curious about the passengers Gorzval had taken on, and about our destination."

Valentine scowled. "I hoped we had shaken them off our track in the jungles!"

"They must have discovered us again in Ni-moya, my lord."

"Then we must lose them again in the Archipelago," said Valentine. "And be wary until then of other spies along our way. I thank you, Vinorkis."

"No thanks are needed, my lord. It is my duty."

A strong wind blew from the south in the morning when the ship set forth. Vinorkis kept close look for the inquisitive Skandar at the pier during the embarkation, but he was nowhere in view; his work was done, Valentine supposed, and some other informant farther on would continue the surveillance on the usurper’s behalf.

The route lay to the east and south; these dragon-ships were accustomed to tack against that constant hostile wind all the way to the hunting grounds. It was a wearying business, but there was no avoiding it, for the sea-dragons were within the reach of hunters only at this season. The Brangalyn had supplementary engine power, but not any great deal of it, fuels of all kinds being so scarce on Majipoor. With a certain majestic clumsiness the Brangalyn picked up the side wind and moved out of Piliplok harbor into the open sea.

This was the smaller sea of Majipoor, the Inner Sea, which separated eastern Zimroel from western Alhanroel. It was no trifle — some five thousand miles from shore to shore — yet it was a mere puddle compared with the Great Sea that occupied most of the other hemisphere, an ocean beyond the possibility of navigation, untold thousands of miles of open water. The Inner Sea was more human in scale, and was broken midway between the continents by the Isle of Sleep — itself big enough so that on another world, of less extraordinary size, it would be considered a continent — and by several major island chains.

The sea-dragons spent their lives in unending migration between the two oceans. Round and round the globe they went, taking years or even decades, so far as anyone knew, to make the circumnavigation. Perhaps a dozen great herds of them inhabited the ocean, traveling constantly from west to east. Every summer one of those herds would complete its journey across the Great Sea, passing south of Narabal and up the southern coast of Zimroel toward Piliplok. It was forbidden to hunt them then, for the herd abounded at that time with pregnant cows. By autumn the young were born, the herd now having reached the windswept waters between Piliplok and the Isle of Sleep, and the annual hunt began. Out from Piliplok came the dragon-ships in great numbers. The herds were thinned of both young and old, and the survivors made their way back into the tropics, passing south of the Isle of Sleep, rounding the hump of Alhanroel’s lengthy Stoienzar Peninsula, and heading on eastward below Alhanroel to the Great Sea, where they would swim unmolested until their time brought them round to Piliplok again.

Of all the beasts of Majipoor, the sea-dragons were by far the largest. Newborn, they were tiny, no more than five or six feet in length, but through all their lives they continued to grow, and their lifespans were long, although no one knew just how long. Gorzval, who let his passengers share his table and proved to be a talkative man now that his anxieties were behind him, was fond of telling tales of the immensity of certain sea-dragons. One that had been taken in the reign of Lord Malibor was a hundred and ninety feet in length, and another, of Confalume’s time, two hundred forty, and in the era when Prestimion was Pontifex and Lord Dekkeret the Coronal they had caught one thirty feet longer than that. But the champion, said Gorzval, was one that had boldly appeared almost in the mouth of Piliplok harbor in the reign of Thimin and Lord Kinniken, and had reliably been measured at three hundred fifteen feet. That monster, known as Lord Kinniken’s dragon, had escaped unharmed because the entire fleet of dragon-ships was then far out to sea. Allegedly it had been sighted again several times by hunters in succeeding centuries, most recently in the year Lord Voriax became Coronal, but no one had ever laid a harpoon on it, and among hunters it had a baleful reputation. "It must be five hundred feet long by now," said Gorzval, "and I pray that some other captain is given the honor of encountering it when it returns to our waters."

Valentine had seen small sea-dragons, pithed, gutted, salted, and dried, sold in marketplaces all over Zimroel, and on occasion he had tasted their meat, which was dark, tangy, and tough. Dragons less than ten feet long were the ones prepared in this way. The meat of larger ones, up to fifty feet or so, was butchered and sold fresh along the eastern coast of Zimroel, but difficulties of transportation kept it from finding markets far from the sea. Beyond that length the dragons were too old to be edible, but their flesh was rendered into oil that had many purposes, petroleum and other fossil hydrocarbons being scarce on Majipoor. The bones of sea-dragons of all sizes had their uses in architecture, for they were nearly as strong as steel and far more readily obtained, and there was medicinal value in the unborn dragon-eggs, found in quantities of many hundreds of pounds in the abdomens of mature females. Dragon-skin, dragon-wings, dragon this and dragon that, everything was put to some benefit and nothing wasted. "This, for example, is dragon-milk," said Gorzval, offering his guests a flask of a pale bluish liquid. "In Ni-moya or Khyntor they’d pay ten crowns for a flask like this. Here, taste it."

Lisamon Hultin took a hesitant sip and spat it on the floor. "Dragon-milk or dragon-piss?" she demanded.

The captain smiled frostily. "In Dulorn," he said, "what you spat out would cost you at least a crown, and you’d count yourself lucky to find some." He pushed the flask toward Sleet, who shook his head, and then to Valentine. After a moment’s pause Valentine put it to his lips.

"Bitter," he said, "and a musty taste, but not entirely terrible. What’s the secret of its appeal?"

The Skandar patted his thighs. "Aphrodisiac!" he boomed. "Stirs the juices! Heats the blood! Prolongs the life!" He pointed jovially at Zalzan Kavol, who, unasked, had taken a robust swig of the stuff. "See? The Skandar knows! The man of Piliplok doesn’t need to be begged to drink it!"

Carabella said, "Dragon-milk? These are mammals?"

"Mammals, yes. The eggs are hatched within, so, and the young born alive, ten or twenty in a litter, rows of nipples all up and down the belly. You think it’s odd, milk from dragons?"

"I think of dragons as reptiles," said Carabella, "and reptiles give no milk."

"Think of dragons as dragons, better. You want to taste?"

"Thank you, no," she replied. "My juices need no stirring."

The meals in the captain’s cabin were the best part of the voyage, Valentine decided. Gorzval was good-natured and outgoing, as Skandars went, and he set a decent table, with wine and meats and fish of various sorts, including a good deal of dragon-flesh. But the ship itself was creaky and cramped, poorly designed and even more poorly maintained, and the crew, a dozen Skandars and an assortment of Hjorts and humans, was uncommunicative and often downright hostile. Obviously these dragon-hunters were a proud and insular lot, even the crew of a bedraggled vessel like the Brangalyn, and resented the presence of outsiders among them as they practiced their mysteries. Only Gorzval seemed at all hospitable; but he clearly felt grateful to them, for their fare was all that had allowed him to get his ship seaworthy.

They were far from land now, in a featureless realm where pale blue ocean met pale blue sky to obliterate all sense of place and direction. The course was south-southeasterly, and the farther they got from Piliplok the warmer grew the wind, hot now and dry as ever. "We call the wind our sending," said Gorzval, "because it comes straight from Suvrael. The little gift of the King of Dreams, it is, as delightful as all his others." The sea was empty: no islands, no drifting logs, no sign of anything, not even dragons. The dragons had gone far past the coast this year, as they sometimes did, and were basking in the tropical waters close by the fringes of the Archipelago. Occasionally a gihorna-bird passed far overhead, making its autumn migration from the islands to the Zimr Marsh, which was not near the Zimr at all but on the coast five hundred miles south of Piliplok; these long-legged creatures must have made tempting targets, but no one took aim at them. Another tradition of the sea, it seemed.

The first dragons manifested themselves the second week out from Piliplok. Gorzval predicted their arrival a day in advance, having dreamed that they were near. "Every captain dreams dragons," he explained. "Our minds are attuned to them; we feel their souls approaching us. There’s a captain, a woman with some teeth out, Guidrag’s her name, who can dream them a week away, sometimes more. Heads right to them and they’re always there. Me, I’m not that good, can’t do better than a day’s distance. But nobody’s as good as Guidrag, anyway. I do my best. We’ll have dragons off the bow in another ten, twelve hours, that’s a guarantee."

Valentine had little confidence in the Skandar captain’s guarantees. But in mid-morning the lookout high in the mast sang out, "Hoy! Dragons ho!"

A great many of them, forty, fifty, maybe more, swarmed just off the Brangalyn’s bow. They were big-bellied ungraceful beasts, broad in cross-section like the Brangalyn itself, with long thick necks, heavy triangular heads, short tails terminating in flat flaring flukes, and prominent ridges of bony projections running the length of their high-vaulted backs. Their wings were the strangest feature of all — fins, really, for it was inconceivable that these huge creatures should ever take to the air, but they looked far more like wings than fins, batwings, dark and leathery, sprouting from massive stumpy bases below the sea-dragons’ necks and sweeping down half the length of their bodies. Most of the dragons kept their wings folded like cloaks, but some had them fully outspread, fanning them out along the axes provided by long fragile-looking finger-bones, and with them they covered the water about them for astonishing spreads, unfurling them like black tarpaulins.

Most of the dragons were young, twenty to fifty feet in length, but there were many newborn ones, six-footers or thereabouts, swimming and splashing freely or else gripping the nipples of their mothers, who tended to be of mid-size range. But among the school drifted a few monsters, half submerged and somnolent, their spine-ridges rising high above the water like the central hills of some floating island. They were unimaginably bulky. It was hard to judge their full magnitude, for their hindquarters tended to droop out of sight, but two or three of them looked at least as large as the ship. As Gorzval passed him on the deck Valentine said, "We don’t have Lord Kinniken’s dragon out there, do we?"

The Skandar captain chuckled indulgently. "Nay, the Kinniken’s three times the size of those, at least. Three? More than three! Those are hardly hundred-fifty-footers. I’ve seen dozens bigger. So will you, friend, before long."

Valentine tried to imagine dragons three times the size of the biggest out there. His mind rebelled. It was like trying to visualize the full scope of Castle Mount: one simply could not do it.

The ship moved in for the kill. It was a smoothly coordinated operation. Boats were lowered, with a lance-wielding Skandar strapped upright in the bow of each. Among the nursing dragons the boats quietly moved, the lancer spearing one here, one there, apportioning the kill among the mothers so that none was aroused by total loss of her young. These young dragons were lashed by their tails to the boats; and as the boats returned to the ship, nets were lowered to hoist the catch. Only when some dozen young dragons had been taken did the hunters go for bigger game. The boats were retracted and the harpooner, a giant Skandar with a naked dull-blue swath across his chest where the fur had long ago been ripped away, took his place in the cupola. Unhurriedly he selected his weapon and nocked it into its catapult while Gorzval maneuvered the ship to give him a good shot at the chosen victim. The harpooner took aim; the dragons grazed on, heedless; Valentine discovered that he was holding his breath and intently squeezing Carabella’s hand. Then the gleaming somber shaft of the harpoon was released.

It buried itself to its haft in the blubbery shoulder of a dragon some ninety feet long and instantly the sea came alive.

The wounded dragon lashed the surface with its tail and unfurled its wings, which beat against the water in titanic fury, as though the animal meant to burst into the air and soar off, dragging the dangling Brangalyn behind it. At that first frantic outburst of pain the mother-dragons opened their wings as well, gathering their nurslings into a protective shield, and with powerful strokes of their tails began to move away, while the largest of the herd, the utter monsters, simply sank from view, letting themselves glide into the depths with scarcely a ripple of energy. This left a dozen or so adolescent dragons, who knew that something disturbing was happening but were not sure how to react; they swam in wide circles around their wounded comrade, holding their wings tentatively half-spread and slapping lightly at the water with them. Meanwhile the harpooner, still choosing his weapons in absolute tranquillity, put a second and a third into his prey, close by the first.

"Boats!" cried Gorzval. "Nets!"

Now began a strange proceeding. Once more the boats were lowered, and the hunters rowed forth. Toward the ring of excited dragons they headed, and hurled into the water grenades of some sort that exploded with dull booming sounds, spreading a slick coating of bright yellow dye. The explosions and, it seemed, the dye sent the remaining dragons into a frenzy of terror. With wild thrashings of wings and tails they swam swiftly out of sight. Only the victim remained, very much alive but held fast. It too was swimming, in a northerly direction, but it towed the entire mass of the Brangalyn along behind it, and it was visibly weakened moment by moment by the effort. The boatmen, with their dye-grenades, attempted to force the dragon closer to the ship; at the same time the netmen lowered a colossal webwork of fabric which by some interior mechanism opened and spread out over the water, and closed again when the dragon had entangled itself in its meshes.

"Winches!" Gorzval roared, and the net rose from the water.

The dragon dangled in mid-air. Its enormous weight caused the huge ship to list alarmingly. Far above, the harpooner rose in his cupola for the coup de grace. He gripped the catapult with all four hands and let fly. A ferocious grunt came from him as he released the weapon and an instant later came an answering sound, hollow, agonized, from the dragon. The harpoon penetrated the dragon’s skull at a point just behind the great saucerlike green eyes. The mighty wings raked the air in one last terrible convulsion.

The rest was mere butchery. The winches did their work, the dragon was hoisted to the slaughter-block, the stripping of the carcass began. Valentine watched awhile, until the gory spectacle palled: the flensing of the blubber, the securing of the valuable internal organs, the severing of the wings, and all the rest. When he had had enough he went below, and when he returned a few hours later the skeleton of the dragon rose like a museum exhibit over the deck, a great white arch topped by that bizarre spiny ridge, and the hunters were at work disassembling even that.

"You look grim," Carabella said to him.

"I lack appreciation of this art," he answered.

It seemed to Valentine that Gorzval could entirely have filled the hold of his vessel, large as it was, with the proceeds of this one school of dragons. But he had chosen a handful of young and only one adult, not by any means the largest, and had deliberately driven the others away. Zalzan Kavol explained that there were quotas, decreed by Coronals in centuries past, to prevent overfishing: herds were to be thinned, not exterminated, and a ship that returned too soon from its voyage would be called to account and subjected to severe penalties. Besides, it was essential to get the dragons quickly on board, before predators arrived, and to process the flesh swiftly; a crew that hunted too greedily would be unable to handle its own catch in an effective and profitable way.

The season’s first kill seemed to make Gorzval’s crew more mellow. They nodded occasionally at the passengers, even smiled now and then, and went about their own tasks in a relaxed and almost cheerful way. Their sullen silence melted; they laughed, joked, sang on deck:

Valentine and Carabella heard the singers — it was the squad barreling the blubber — and went aft to listen more closely. Carabella, quickly picking up the simple robust melody, quietly began to finger it on her pocket-harp, adding little fanciful cadenzas between the verses.

"Look," Carabella said. "There’s Zalzan Kavol." Valentine glanced across the way. Yes, there was the Skandar, listening at the far side near the rail, all his arms folded, a deepening scowl on his face. He did not seem to be enjoying the song. What was the matter with him?

Valentine laughed and clapped his hands. That brought an immediate fierce glare from Zalzan Kavol, who strode toward them looking huffy with indignation.

"My lord!" he cried. "Will you tolerate such irreverent—"

"Not so loud on the my lord," Valentine said crisply. "Irreverent, you say? What are you talking about?"

"No respect for a terrible tragedy! No respect for a fallen Coronal! No respect for—"

"Zalzan Kavol!" Valentine said slyly. "Are you such a lover of respectability, then?"

"I know what is right and what is wrong, my lord. To mock the death of Lord Malibor is—"

"Be more easy, my friend," Valentine said gently, putting his hand on one of the Skandar’s gigantic forearms. "Where Lord Malibor has gone, he is far beyond matters of respect or disrespect. And I thought the song was a delight. If I take no offense, Zalzan Kavol, why should you?"

But Zalzan Kavol continued to grumble and bluster. "If I may say it, my lord, you may not yet be returned to a full sense of the rightness of things. If I were you, I would go to those sailors now and order them never to sing such a thing again in your presence."

"In my presence?" Valentine said, with a broad grin. "Why should they care dragon-spittle for my presence? Who am I but a passenger, barely tolerated at all? If I said any such thing, I’d be over the rail in a minute, and dragon-feed myself the next. Eh? Think about it, Zalzan Kavol! And calm yourself, fellow. It’s only a silly sailor-song."

"Nevertheless," the Skandar muttered, walking stiffly away.

Carabella giggled. "He takes himself so seriously."

Valentine began to hum, then to sing:

"Yes, that’s it," he said. "Love, will you do me a service? When those men are through with their work, draw one of them aside — the red-bearded one, I think, with the deep bass voice — and have him teach you the words. And then teach them to me. And I can sing it to Zalzan Kavol to make him smile, eh? How does it go? Let’s see—"

A week or thereabouts passed before they sighted dragons again, and in that time not only Carabella and Valentine learned the ditty, but Lisamon Hultin as well, who took pleasure in bellowing it across the decks in her raucous baritone. But Zalzan Kavol continued to growl and snort whenever he heard it.

The second school of dragons was much larger than the first, and Gorzval allowed the taking of some two dozen small ones, one mid-sized one, and one titan at least a hundred thirty feet long. That kept all hands busy for the next few days. The deck ran purple with dragons’ blood, and bones and wings were stacked all over the ship as the crew labored to get everything down to storable size. At the captain’s table delicacies were offered, from the most mysterious inner parts of the creature, and Gorzval, ever more expansive, brought forth casks of fine wines, quite unsuspected from someone who had been at the edge of bankruptcy. "Piliplok golden," he said, pouring with a lavish hand. "I have saved this wine for some special occasion, and doubtless this is it. You have brought us excellent luck."

"Your fellow captains will not be joyed to hear that," Valentine said. "We might easily have sailed with them, if they had only known how charmed we were."

"Their loss, our gain. To your pilgrimage, my friends!" cried the Skandar captain.

They were moving now through ever more balmy waters. The hot wind out of Suvrael relented here at the edge of the tropics, and a kinder, moister breeze came to them out of the southwest, from the distant Stoienzar Peninsula of Alhanroel. The water was a deep green hue, sea-birds were numerous, algae grew so thick in places that navigation was sometimes impeded, and brightly colored fish could be seen darting just below the surface — the prey of the dragons, who were flesh-eaters and swam open-mouthed through swarms of lesser sea-creatures. The Rodamaunt Archipelago now lay not far away. Gorzval proposed to complete his haul here: the Brangalyn had room for another few large dragons, two more of mid-size, and perhaps forty of the small, and then he would drop his passengers and head for Piliplok to market his catch.

"Dragons ho!" came the lookout’s cry.

This was the greatest school yet, hundreds of them, spiny humps rising above the water everywhere. For two days the Brangalyn moved among them, slaughtering at will. On the horizon other ships could be seen, but they were far off, for strict rules governed impinging on hunting territory.

Gorzval seemed to glow with the success of his voyage. He himself took frequent turns in the boat-crews, which Valentine gathered was unusual, and once he even made his way to the cupola to wield a harpoon. The ship now was settling low to the waterline with the weight of dragon-flesh.

On the third day dragons were still close about them, undismayed by the carnage and unwilling to scatter. "One more big one," Gorzval vowed, "and then we make for the islands."

He selected an eighty-footer for the final target.

Valentine had grown bored, and more than bored, with the butchery, and as the harpooner sent his third shaft into the prey he turned away, and walked to the far side of the deck. There he found Sleet, and they stood by the rail, peering off to the east.

"Do you think we can see the Archipelago from here?" Valentine asked. "I long for solid land again, and an end to the stink of dragon-blood in my nostrils."

"My eyes are keen, my lord, but the islands are two days’ sailing from here, and I think even my vision has limits. But—" Sleet gasped. "My lord—"

"What is it?"

"An island comes swimming toward us, my lord!"

Valentine stared, but with difficulty at first: it was morning and a brilliant fiery glare lit the surface of the sea. But Sleet took Valentine’s hand and pointed with it, and then Valentine saw. A ridged dragon-spine broke the water, a spine that went on and on and on, and below it a vast and implausible bulk was dimly visible.

"Lord Kinniken’s dragon!" Valentine said in a choked voice. "And it comes straight at us!"

—4—

KINNIKEN’S IT MIGHT BE, or more likely some other not nearly so great, but it was great enough, larger than the Brangalyn, and it was bearing down on them steadily and unhesitatingly — either an avenging angel or else an unthinking force, there was no knowing that, but its mass was unarguable.

"Where is Gorzval?" Sleet blurted. "Weapons— guns—"

Valentine laughed. "As easily stop a rock-slide with a harpoon, Sleet. Are you a good swimmer?"

Most of the hunters were preoccupied with their catch. But some had looked the other way now, and there was frantic activity on deck. The harpooner had whirled round and stood outlined against the sky, weapons in every hand. Others had mounted the adjoining cupolas. Valentine, searching for Carabella and Deliamber and the others, caught sight of Gorzval rushing madly toward the helm; the Skandar’s face was livid and his eyes were bugging, and he looked like one who stood in the presence of the ministers of death.

"Lower the boats!" someone screamed. Winches turned. Figures ran about wildly. One, a Hjort black-cheeked with fear, shook a fist at Valentine and caught him roughly by the arm, muttering, "You brought this on us! You should never have been allowed on board, any of you!"

Lisamon Hultin appeared from somewhere and swept the Hjort aside like so much chaff. Then she flung her powerful arms around Valentine as if to protect him from any harm that might come.

"The Hjort was right, you know," said Valentine calmly. "We are an ill-omened bunch. First Zalzan Kavol loses his wagon, and now poor Gorzval loses—"

There was a ghastly impact as the onrushing dragon crashed broadside into the Brangalyn.

The ship heeled over as though it had been pushed by a giant’s hand, then rolled dizzyingly back the other way. An awful shudder shook its timbers. A secondary impact came — the wings hitting the hull, the thrashing flukes? — and then another, and the Brangalyn bobbed like a cork. "We’re stove in!" a desperate voice cried. Things rolled free on the deck, a giant rendering cauldron breaking its moorings and tumbling over three hapless crewmen, a case of boning-axes ripping loose and skidding over the side. As the ship continued to sway and lurch, Valentine caught a glimpse of the great dragon on the far side, where the recent catch still hung, unbalancing everything; and the monster swung around and headed in for another attack. There could be no doubt now of the purposefulness of its onslaught.

The dragon struck, shoulder-side on; the Brangalyn rocked wildly; Valentine grunted as Lisamon Hultin’s grip became an almost crushing embrace. He had no idea where any of the others might be, nor whether they would survive. Clearly the ship was doomed. Already it was listing badly as water poured into the hold. The tail of the dragon rose nearly to deck-level and struck again. Everything dissolved into chaos. Valentine felt himself flying; he soared gracefully, he dipped and bobbed, he plunged with elegance and skill toward the water.

He landed in something much like a whirlpool and was drawn down into the terrible turbulent spin.

As he went under Valentine could not help but hear the ballad of Lord Malibor ringing in his mind. In truth that Coronal had taken a fancy for dragon-hunting some ten years back, and had gone out in what was said to be the finest dragon-ship in Piliplok, and the ship had been lost with all hands. No one knew what had happened, but — so it came out of Valentine’s spotty recollections — the government had spoken of a sudden storm. More likely, he thought, it had been this killer-beast, this avenger of dragonkind.

And now a second Coronal, successor but one to Malibor, would meet the same fate. Valentine was oddly unmoved by that. He had thought himself dying in the rapids of the Steiche, and had survived that; here, with a hundred miles of sea between him and any sort of safety, and a rampaging monster lashing about close at hand, he was even more surely doomed, but there was no use bemoaning it. The Divine had clearly withdrawn its favor from him. What grieved him was that others whom he loved would die with him, merely because they had been loyal, because they had pledged themselves to follow him on his journey to the Isle, because they had tied themselves to a luckless Coronal and a luckless dragon-captain and now must share their evil destinies.

He was sucked deep into the heart of the ocean and ceased to ponder the tides of luck. He struggled for breath, coughed, choked, spat out water and swallowed more. His head pounded mercilessly. Carabella, he thought, and darkness engulfed him.

Valentine had never, since awakening out of his broken past to find himself near Pidruid, given much thought to a philosophy of death. Life held challenges enough for him. He recalled vaguely what he had been taught in boyhood, that all souls return to the Divine Source at their last moment when the release of life-energy comes, and travel over the Bridge of Farewells, the bridge that is the prime responsibility of the Pontifex. But whether there might be truth in that, whether there was a world beyond, and if so of what sort, Valentine had never paused to consider. Now, though, he returned to consciousness in a place so strange that it surpassed the imaginings of even the most fertile of thinkers.

Was this the afterlife? It was a giant chamber, a great silent room with thick moist pink walls and a roof that was in places high and domed, supported by mighty pillars, and in other places drooped until it nearly touched the floor. In that roof were mounted huge glowing hemispheres that emitted a faint blue light, as if by phosphorescence. The air in here was rank and steamy, and had a sharp, bitter flavor, unpleasant and stifling. Valentine lay on his side against a wet slippery surface, rough to the touch, deeply corrugated, quivering with constant deep palpitations and tremors. He put the flat of his hand to it and felt a kind of convulsion deep within. The texture of the ground was like nothing he had known before, and those tiny but perceptible motions within it made him wonder if what he had entered was not the world after death but merely some grotesque hallucination.

Valentine got unsteadily to his feet. His clothing was soaked, he had lost one boot somewhere, his lips burned with the taste of salt, his lungs seemed full of water, and he felt shaky and dazed; furthermore it was hard to keep upright on this unendingly trembling surface. Looking about, he saw by the dim pale luminosity a kind of vegetation, pliant whip-shaped growths, thick and fleshy and leafless, sprouting from the ground. They too writhed with inner animation. Making his way between two lofty pillars and through an area where ceiling and floor almost met, he caught sight of what seemed to be a pond of some greenish fluid. Beyond that he was unable to see in the dimness.

He walked toward the pond and perceived something exceedingly odd in it: hundreds of brightly colored fish, of the kind that he had seen flitting about in the water before the day’s hunt had begun. They were not swimming now. They were dead and decaying, flesh stripping away from bones, and below them in the pool was a carpet of similar bones, many feet thick.

Suddenly there was a sound as of the roaring of the wind behind him. Valentine turned. The walls of the chamber were in motion, pulling back, the drooping places in the ceiling retracting to create a vast open space; and a torrent of water came rushing toward him, as high as his hips. He barely had time to reach one of the ceiling-pillars and fling his arms tight about it; then the inrushing of water sluiced about him with tremendous force. He held on. It seemed that half the Inner Sea was pouring past him, and for a moment he thought he would lose his grip, but then the flow subsided and the water drained away through slits that materialized abruptly in the floor — leaving in its wake scores of stranded fish. The floor convulsed; the fleshy whips swept the desperate flopping fish across the floor to the greenish pool; and once they entered it they quickly ceased to move.

Suddenly Valentine understood.

I am not dead, he knew, nor is this any place of afterlife. I am within the belly of the dragon. He began to laugh.

Valentine threw back his head and let giant guffaws pour from him. What other response was fitting? To cry? To curse? The vast beast had gobbled him whole at a gulp, had sucked in the Coronal of Majipoor as heedlessly as it might a minnow. But he was too big to be propelled into that digestive pond down there, so here he was, camped on the floor of the dragon’s maw, in this cathedral of an alimentary canal. What now? Hold court for the fishes? Dispense justice among them as they came sweeping in? Settle down here and spend the rest of his days dining on raw fish stolen from the monster’s catch?

It was high comedy, Valentine thought.

But dark tragedy as well, for Sleet and Carabella and young Shanamir and all the others, drawn down to death in the wreck of the Brangalyn, victims of their own sympathies and of his awesomely bad luck. For them he felt only anguish. Carabella’s lilting voice silenced forever, and Sleet’s miraculous skills of hand and eye forever lost, and the rough-souled Skandars no longer to fill the air with whirling multitudes of knives and sickles and torches, and Shanamir cut off before he had fairly begun his life—

Valentine could not bear thinking about them.

For himself, though, there was only cosmic amusement at this absurd plight. To take his mind from grief and pain and loss he laughed again, and stretched his arms wide to the distant walls of the strange room. "Lord Valentine’s Castle, this is!" he cried. "The throne-room! I invite you all to dine with me in the grand feasting-hall!"

Out of the murky distance a booming voice called, "By my gut, I accept that invitation!"

Valentine was astounded beyond all measure.

"Lisamon?"

"No, it’s the Pontifex Tyeveras and his cross-eyed uncle! Is that you, Valentine?"

"Yes! Where are you?"

"In the gizzard of this stinking dragon! Where are you?"

"Not far from you! But I can’t see you!"

"Sing," she called. "Stay where you are and sing, and keep singing! I’ll try to reach you!"

Valentine began, in the loudest voice he could muster:

Again the roaring sound came; again the great creature’s gullet opened to admit a cascade of sea-water and a horde of fish; again Valentine clung to a pillar as the influx hit him.

"Oh — by the Divine’s toes," Lisamon cried. "Hang on, Valentine, hang on!"

He hung on until the force was spent, and slumped against the pillar, soaked, panting. Somewhere in the distance the giantess called to him, and he called back. Her voice grew nearer. She urged him to keep singing, and he did:

He heard her occasionally bawling a snatch of the ballad herself, with amiably bawdy embellishments, as she approached through the intricacies of the dragon’s interior, and then he looked up and saw by the faint luminous light her enormous form looming above him. He smiled at her. She smiled, and laughed, and he laughed with her, and they clasped one another in a wet, slippery embrace.

But the sight of one who had survived put him in mind again of those who surely had not, and plunged him once more into grief and shame. He turned away, biting at his lip.

"My lord?" she said puzzledly.

"Only we two remain, Lisamon."

"Yes, and praises be for that!"

"But the others — they’d live now, if they hadn’t been so stupid as to go chasing across the world with me—"

She caught him by the arm. "My lord, will mourning them bring them back to life, if dead they be?"

"I know all that. But—"

"We are safe. If we have lost our friends, my lord, that’s cause for sorrow indeed, but not for guilt. They followed you of their own free choice, eh, my lord? And if their time has come, well, it is because their time has come, and how could that have been otherwise? Will you give up this grief, my lord, and rejoice that we are safe?"

He shrugged. "Safe, yes. And yes, grief brings no one back to life. But how safe are we? How long can we survive in here, Lisamon?"

"Long enough for me to cut us free." She pulled her vibration-sword out of its sheath.

Amazed, he said, "You think you can hack a path to the outside?"

"Why not? I’ve cut through worse."

"At the first touch of that thing to the dragon’s flesh it’ll dive to the bottom of the sea. We’re safer in here than trying to swim up from five miles underneath."

"It was said of you that you are an optimist at the darkest time," the warrior-woman declared. "Where’s that optimism now? The dragon lives at the surface. It might thrash a bit, but it won’t dive. And if we do emerge five miles down? At least it’s a quick death. Can you breathe this foul muck forever? Can you wander for long inside a single giant fish?"

Gingerly Lisamon Hultin touched the tip of the vibration sword to the side wall The thick moist flesh quivered a bit but did not recoil. "You see? It’s got no nerves in here," she said, driving the weapon a little deeper and turning it to excavate a cavity. There were tremors and twitches. She kept digging. "Do you think anyone else was swallowed with us?" she asked.

"Yours was the only voice I’ve heard."

"And I only yours. Phaugh, what a monster! I tried to hold you as we went overboard, but when we were struck the last time I lost my grip on you. We came to the same place, anyway." She had by now opened a hole a foot deep and two feet wide in the side of the dragon’s stomach. It seemed hardly to feel the surgery at all. We are like maggots gnawing within it, Valentine thought. Lisamon Hultin said, "While I cut, you see if you can find anyone else. But don’t stray too far, hear?"

"I’ll be careful."

He chose a route along the stomach wall, groping in the half-darkness, pausing twice to hang on through inrushes of water, and calling out constantly in the hope that someone might reply. No replies came. Her excavation was enormous now; he saw her deep within the dragon’s flesh, still hacking away. Gobbets of severed meat were piled on all sides and thick purplish blood stained her entire body. She was singing cheerfully as she cut.

"How far do you think it is to the outside?" he asked.

"Half a mile or so."

"Really?"

She laughed. "I suppose ten or fifteen feet. Here, clear the opening behind me. This meat’s piling up faster than I can sweep it away."

Feeling like a butcher, and not enjoying the sensation much, Valentine seized the chunks of severed flesh and hauled them back out of the cavity, tossing them as far as he could. He shivered in horror as he saw the fleshy whips of the stomach floor seize the meat and sweep it blithely on toward the digestive pond. Any protein was welcome here, so it seemed.

Deeper, deeper they traveled into the dragon’s abdominal wall. Valentine tried to calculate the probable width of it, taking the length of the creature at no less than three hundred feet; but the arithmetic became a muddle. They were working in close quarters and in a foul, hot atmosphere. The blood, the raw meat, the sweat, the narrowness of the cavity — it was hard to imagine a more repellent place.

Valentine looked back. "The hole’s closing behind us!"

"Beast that lives forever must have tricks of healing," the giantess muttered. She thrust and gouged and hacked. Uneasily Valentine watched new flesh sprouting as if by magic, the wound healing with phenomenal speed. What if they became encapsulated in this opening? Smothered by joining flesh? Lisamon Hultin pretended to be unworried, but he saw her working harder, faster, grunting and moaning, standing with colossal legs planted far apart and shoulders braced. The gash was sealed to their rear, pink new meat covering the hole, and now it was closing at the sides. Lisamon Hultin slashed and cut with furious intensity, and Valentine continued his humbler task of clearing the debris, but she was plainly wearying now, her giant strength visibly diminished, and the hole seemed to be closing almost as fast as she could cut.

"Don’t know if I — can keep — it up—" she muttered.

"Give me the sword, then!"

She laughed. "Watch out! You can’t do it!" In wild rage she returned to the struggle, bellowing curses at the dragon’s flesh as it sprouted around her. It was impossible now to tell where they were; they were burrowing through a realm without landmarks. Her grunts grew sharper and shorter.

"Maybe we should try to go back to the stomach area," he suggested. "Before we’re trapped so—"

"No!" she roared. "I think we’re getting there! Not so meaty here — tougher, more like muscle — maybe the sheath just under the hide—"

Suddenly sea-water poured in on them. "We’re through!" Lisamon Hultin cried. She turned, seizing Valentine as though he were a doll, and pushed him forward, headfirst into the opening in the monster’s flank. Her arms were locked in a fierce grip around his hips. She gave one tremendous thrust and he barely had time to fill his lungs with air before he was projected out through the slippery walls into the cool green embrace of the ocean. Lisamon Hultin emerged just after him, still gripping him tightly, now by his ankle and then by his wrist, and they rocketed upward, upward, rising like corks.

For what seemed like hours they flew toward the surface. Valentine’s forehead ached. His ribs soon would burst. His chest was on fire. We are climbing from the very bottom of the sea, he thought bleakly, and we will drown before we reach the air, or our blood will boil the way it does in divers who go too deep in search of the eyestones off Til-omon, or we will be squeezed flat by the pressure, or—

He erupted into clear sweet air, popping nearly the full length of his body out of the water and falling back with a splash. Limply he floated, a straw on the waters, weak, trembling, struggling for breath. Lisamon Hultin floated alongside. The warm beautiful sun blazed wonderfully, straight overhead.

He was alive, and he was unharmed, and he was free of the dragon.

And he bobbed somewhere on the breast of the Inner Sea, a hundred miles from anywhere.

—5—

WHEN THE FIRST MOMENTS of exhaustion had passed, he raised his head and peered about. The dragon was still visible, hump and ridge above the surface, only a few hundred yards away. But it seemed placid and appeared to be swimming slowly in the opposite direction. Of the Brangalyn there was no trace — only scattered timbers over a broad span of ocean. Nor were other survivors in view.

They swam to the nearest timber, a good-sized strip of the hull, and flung themselves across it. For a long while neither of them spoke. At length Valentine said, "And now do we swim to the Archipelago? Or should we simply go straight on to the Isle of Sleep?"

"Swimming is hard work, my lord. We could ride on the dragon’s back."

"But how guide him?"

"Tug on the wings," she suggested.

"I have my doubts of that."

They were silent again.

Valentine said, "At least in the belly of the dragon we had a fresh catch of fish delivered every few minutes."

"And the inn was large," Lisamon Hultin added. "But poorly ventilated. I think I prefer it here."

"But how long can we drift like this?"

She looked at him strangely. "Do you doubt that we’ll be rescued, my lord?"

"It seems reasonably in doubt, yes."

"It was prophesied to me in a dream from the Lady," said the giantess, "that my death would come in a dry place when I was very old. I am still young and this place is the least dry on all of Majipoor, except perhaps the middle of the Great Sea. Therefore there is nothing to fear. I will not perish here, and neither will you."

"A comforting revelation," Valentine said. "But what will we do?"

"Can you accomplish sendings, my lord?"

"I was Coronal, not King of Dreams."

"But any mind can reach any other, with true intent! Do you think only the King and Lady have such skills? The little wizard Deliamber talked into minds at night, I know that, and Gorzval said he spoke with dragons in his sleep, and you—"

"I am barely myself, Lisamon. Such of my mind as is left to me will send no sendings."

"Try. Reach out across the waters. To the Lady your mother, my lord, or to her people on the Isle, or to the folk of the Archipelago. You have the power. I am only a stupid swinger of swords, but you, lord, have a mind that was deemed worthy of the Castle, and now, in the hour of our need—" The giantess seemed transfigured with passion. "Do it, Lord Valentine! Call for help, and help will come!"

Valentine was skeptical. He knew little of the network of dream-communication that seemed to bind this planet together; it did appear that mind often called to mind, and of course there were the Powers of the Isle and of Suvrael supposedly sending directed messages forth by some means of mechanical amplification, but yet, drifting here on a slab of wood in the ocean, body and clothes filthied with the flesh and blood of the giant beast that lately had swallowed him, spirit so drained by unending adversity that even his legendary sunny faith in luck and miracles was put to rout — how could he hope to summon aid across such a gulf?

He closed his eyes. He sought to concentrate the energies of his mind in a single point deep within his skull. He imagined a glowing spark of light there, a hidden radiance that he could tap and beam forth. But it was useless. He found himself wondering what toothy creature might soon be nibbling at his dangling feet. He distracted himself with fears that any messages he might send would reach only as far as the hazy mind of the dragon nearby, that had destroyed the Brangalyn and almost all its people, and now might wish to turn back and finish the job. Still, he tried. For all his doubts, he owed it to Lisamon Hultin to make the attempt. He held himself still, barely breathing, seeking intently to do whatever it might be that could transmit such a message.

On and off during the afternoon and early evening he attempted it. Darkness came on quickly, and the water grew strangely luminescent, flickering with a ghostly greenish light. They did not dare sleep at the same time, for fear they might slip from the timber and be lost; so they took turns, and when it was Valentine’s turn he fought hard for wakefulness, thinking more than once that he was losing consciousness. Creatures swam near them in the night, making tracks of cold fire through the luminous wavelets.

From time to time Valentine tried the sending-forth of messages again. But he saw no avail in it.

We are lost, he thought.

Toward morning he gave himself up to sleep, and had perplexing dreams of dancing eels atop the water. Vaguely, while sleeping, he strived to reach far-off minds with his mind, and then he slipped into a slumber too deep for that.

And woke to the touch of Lisamon Hultin’s hand on his shoulder.

"My lord?"

He opened his eyes and looked at her in bewilderment.

"My lord, you may stop making sendings now. We are saved!"

"What?"

"A boat, my lord! See? From the east?"

Wearily he raised his head and followed her gesture. A boat, yes, a small one, coming toward them. Oars flashing in the sunlight. Hallucination, he thought. Delusion. Mirage.

But the boat grew larger against the horizon, and then it was there, and hands were groping for him, hauling him up, and he was sprawled feebly against someone and someone else was putting a flask to his lips, a cool drink, wine, water, he had no way of telling, and they were peeling off his soggy befouled garments and wrapping him in something clean and dry. Strangers, two men and a woman, with great manes of tawny hair and clothing of an unfamiliar sort. He heard Lisamon Hultin talking with them, but the words were blurred and indistinct, and he made no attempt to discern their meaning. Had he conjured up these rescuers with his mental broadcast, then? Angels, were they? Spirits? Valentine settled back, hardly caring, totally spent. He thought hazily of drawing Lisamon Hultin aside and telling her to make no mention of his true identity, but he lacked even the energy for that, and hoped she would have sense enough not to compound absurdity with absurdity by saying any such thing. "He is Coronal of Majipoor in disguise, yes, and the dragon swallowed us both but we were able to cut ourselves free, and—" Yes. Certainly that would have the ring of unanswerable truth to these people. Valentine smiled faintly and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

When he woke he was in a pleasant sunlit room, facing out on a broad golden beach, and Carabella was looking down at him with an expression of grave concern. "My lord?" she said softly. "Do you hear me?"

"Is this a dream?"

"This is the island of Mardigile in the Archipelago," she told him. "You were picked up yesterday, drifting in the ocean, along with the giantess. These islanders are fisherfolk, who have been scouting the sea for survivors since the ship went down."

"Who else lives?" Valentine asked quickly. "Deliamber and Zalzan Kavol are here with me. The Mardigile folk say that Khun, Shanamir, Vinorkis, and some Skandars — I don’t know if they’re ours — were picked up by boats from a neighboring island. Some of the dragon-hunters escaped in their own boats and have reached the islands too."

"And Sleet? What of Sleet?"

Carabella showed, for a flashing moment, a look of fear. "I have no news of Sleet," she said. "But the rescue is continuing. He may be safe on one of these islands. There are dozens hereabouts. The Divine has preserved us so far: we will not be cast aside now." She laughed lightly. "Lisamon Hultin has told a wonderful story of how you both were swallowed by the great dragon, and hacked your way out with the vibration-sword. The islanders love it. They think it’s the most splendid fable since the tale of Lord Stiamot and the—"

"It happened," Valentine said.

"My lord?"

"The dragon. Swallowing us. She tells the truth." Carabella giggled. "When I first learned in dreams of your real self, I believed that. But when you tell me—"

"Within the dragon," Valentine said earnestly, "there were great pillars holding up the vault of the stomach, and an opening at one end through which sea-water came rushing every few minutes, and with it came fish that were pushed by little whips toward a greenish pond where they were digested, and where the giantess and I would have been digested too, if we were less lucky. Did she tell you that? And do you think we spent our time out there inventing a fable to amuse you all?"

Eyes wide, Carabella said, "She told the same story, yes. But we thought—"

"It’s true, Carabella."

"Then it is a miracle of the Divine, and you will be famous in all time to come!"

"I’m already going to be famous," said Valentine acidly, "as the Coronal who lost his throne, and took up juggling for lack of a royal occupation. That will win me a place in the ballads alongside the Pontifex Arioc, who made himself Lady of the Isle. The dragon, now, that only embellishes the legend I’m creating around myself." His expression changed suddenly. "You’ve told none of these people who I am, I hope?"

"Not a word, my lord."

"Good. Keep it that way. They have enough difficult things to believe about us, as it is."

An islander, slim and tanned and with the great sweep of fair hair that seemed the universal style here, brought Valentine a tray of food: some clear soup, a tender piece of baked fish, triangular wedges of a fruit with dark indigo flesh dotted with tiny scarlet seeds. Valentine found himself ravenously hungry.

Afterward he strolled with Carabella on the beach outside his cottage. "Once again I thought you were lost to me forever," he said softly. "I thought I would never hear your voice again."

"Do I matter that much to you, my lord?"

"More than I could ever tell you."

She smiled sadly. "Such pretty words, eh, Valentine? For so I call you, Valentine, but you are Lord Valentine, and how many fancy women do you have, Lord Valentine, waiting for you on Castle Mount?"

He had now and then been thinking the same thing himself. Had he a lover there? Many of them? An intended bride, even? So much of his past was still shrouded. And if he reached the Castle, and if a woman who had waited for him came forth to him—

"No," he said. "You are mine, Carabella, and I am yours, and whatever may have been in the past — if ever anything was — lies in the past now. I have a different face these days. I have a different soul."

She looked skeptical, but did not challenge what he had said, and he lightly kissed her frown away.

"Sing to me," he said. "The song you sang under the bush in Pidruid, the festival-night. Not all the wealth of Castle Mount, it went, Is worth my love to me. Eh?"

"I know another much like it," she said, and took up the pocket-harp from her hip:

"A different sort of song, that one," Valentine said. "A sadder one. Sing me that other, love."

"Another time."

"Please. This is a time of joy, of reuniting, Carabella. Please."

She smiled and sighed and took up the harp again.

Yes, he thought. Yes, that one was better. He let his hand rest tenderly on the nape of her neck, and stroked it as they walked along the beach. It was astonishingly beautiful here, warm and peaceful. Birds of fifty hues perched in the tortuous-limbed little trees of the shore, and a crystalline sea, surfless, transparent, lapped at the fine sand. The air was soft and mild, fragrant with the perfumes of unknown blossoms. From far away came the sound of laughter and of a gay, bright, tinkling music. How tempting it was, Valentine thought, to abandon all fantasies of Castle Mount and settle forever on Mardigile, and go out at dawn on a fishing-boat for the catch, and spend the rest of each day frolicking in the hot sunshine.

But there would be no such abdications for him. In the afternoon Zalzan Kavol and Autifon Deliamber, both healthy and well rested after their ordeals at sea, came to call on him, and soon they were talking of ways and means to continue the journey.

Zalzan Kavol, parsimonious as always, had had the money-pouch on him when the Brangalyn went down, and so at least half their treasury had survived, even if Shanamir had lost the rest. The Skandar laid out the glittering coins. "With this," he said, "we can hire these fisherfolk to convey us to the Isle. I have spoken with our hosts. This Archipelago is nine hundred miles in length, and numbers three thousand islands, more than eight hundred of them inhabited. No one here wishes to journey all the way to the Isle, but for a few royals we can hire a large trimaran that will carry us to Rodamaunt Graun, near the mid-point of the chain, and there we can probably find transport the rest of the way."

"When can we leave?" Valentine asked.

"As soon," said Deliamber, "as we are reunited once more. I am told that several of our people are on their way across from the nearby isle of Burbont at this moment."

"Which ones?"

"Khun, Vinorkis, and Shanamir," Zalzan Kavol answered, "and my brothers Erfon and Rovorn. With them is Captain Gorzval. Gibor Haern is lost at sea — I saw him perish, struck by a timber and sent under — and of Sleet there is no news."

Valentine touched the Skandar’s shaggy forearm. "I grieve for your latest loss."

Zalzan Kavol’s feelings seemed well under control. "Let us rather rejoice that some of us still live, my lord," he said quietly.

In early afternoon a boat from Burbont brought the other survivors. There were embraces all around; and then Valentine turned to Gorzval, who stood apart, looking numb and bewildered, rubbing at the stump of his severed arm. The dragon-captain seemed in shock. Valentine would have put his arms around the hapless man, but the instant he approached, Gorzval sank to his knees in the sand and touched his forehead to the ground and stayed there, trembling, arms outspread in the starburst gesture. "My lord—" he whispered harshly. "My lord—"

Valentine, displeased, looked around. "Who has been talking?"

Silence a moment. Then Shanamir, a bit frightened, said, "I, my lord. I meant no harm. The Skandar seemed so injured by the loss of his ship — I thought to console him by telling him who his passenger had been, that he had become part of the history of Majipoor by giving you voyage. This was before we knew that you had survived the wreck." The boy’s lip quivered. "My lord, I meant no harm by it!"

Valentine nodded. "And no harm was done. I forgive you. Gorzval?"

The cowering dragon-captain remained huddled at Valentine’s feet.

"Look up, Gorzval. I can’t talk to you this way."

"My lord?"

"Get to your feet."

"My lord—"

"Please, Gorzval. Get up!"

The Skandar, amazed, peered at Valentine and said, "Please, you say? Please?"

Valentine laughed. "I’ve forgotten the habits of power, I suppose. All right: Up! I command it!"

Shakily Gorzval rose. He was a miserable sight, this little three-armed Skandar, his fur matted, sandy, his eyes bloodshot, his expression downcast.

Valentine said, "I brought foul luck upon you, and you had no need of more of that. Accept my apologies; and if fortune begins to smile more kindly on me, I will repair the harm you have suffered, someday. I promise you that. What will you do now? Gather your crew and return to Piliplok?"

Gorzval shook his head pathetically. "I could never go there again. I have no ship, I have no reputation, I have no money. I have lost everything and it can never be regained. My people were released of their indentures when the Brangalyn sank. I am alone now. I am ruined."

"Come with us to the Isle of the Lady, then, Gorzval."

"My lord?"

"You can’t stay here. I think these islanders prefer not to take in settlers, and this is no climate for a Skandar, anyway. Nor can a dragon-hunter become a fisherman, I think, without knowing pain every time he casts his nets. Come with us. If we get no farther than the Isle, you may find peace there in the service of the Lady; and if we continue on our quest, there will be honor for you as we make the ascent of Castle Mount. What do you say, Gorzval?"

"It frightens me to be near you, my lord."

"Am I so terrifying? Do I have a dragon’s mouth? Do you see these people green-faced with fear?" Valentine clapped the Skandar on his shoulder. To Zalzan Kavol he said, "No one can replace the brothers you have lost. But at least I give you another companion of your own kind. And now let’s make arrangements for departure, eh? The Isle is still many days’ journey away."

Within an hour Zalzan Kavol had secured an island craft to carry them eastward in the morning. That evening the hospitable islanders provided them with a splendid feast, cool green wines and sleek sweet fruits and fine fresh sea-dragon flesh. That last made Valentine queasy, and he would have pushed it away, but he saw Lisamon Hultin shoveling it in as though it were the last meal she would eat. As an exercise in self-discipline he decided to force a morsel into his own throat, and found the flavor so irresistible that he renounced on the spot any discomfort that sea-dragons might arouse in his mind. As they ate, sunset came, at an early hour here in the tropics, and an extraordinary one it was, streaking the sky with rich throbbing tones of amber and violet and magenta and gold. Surely these were blessed islands, Valentine thought, extraordinarily joyous places even on a world where most places were happy ones and most lives fulfilled. The population seemed generally homogeneous, handsome long-legged folk of human blood with thick unshorn golden hair and smooth honey-colored skin, though there was a scattering of Vroons and even Ghayrogs among them, and Deliamber said that other islands in the chain had people of different stocks. According to Deliamber, who had been mingling freely since his rescue, the islands were largely out of touch with the mainland continents, and went their way in a world of their own, ignorant of matters of high destiny in the greater world. When Valentine asked one of his hosts if Lord Valentine the Coronal had happened to pass this way on his recent journey to Zimroel, the woman gave him a blank look and said ingenuously, "Is the Coronal not Lord Voriax?"

"Dead two years or more, I hear," one of the other islanders declared, and it seemed to come as news to most of the people at the table.

Valentine shared his cottage with Carabella that night. They stood together a long while on the veranda, eyes fixed on the brilliant white track of moonlight gleaming out across the sea toward distant Piliplok. He thought of the sea-dragons grazing in that sea, and of the monster in whose belly he had made that dreamlike sojourn, and, with pain, of his two lost comrades, Gibor Haern and Sleet, one of whom was deep in the sea now, the other perhaps. So great a journey, he thought, remembering Pidruid, Dulorn, Mazadone, Ilirivoyne, Ni-moya, remembering the flight through the forest, the turbulence of the Steiche, the coldness of the Piliplok dragon-captains, the look of the dragon as it bore down on poor Gorzval’s doomed vessel. So great a journey, so many thousands of miles, and so many miles yet to cover before he could begin to answer the questions that flooded his soul.

Carabella nestled close beside him, silent. Her attitude toward him was constantly evolving, and now had become a mixture of awe and love, of deference and irreverence, for she accepted and respected him as true Coronal, and yet remembered his innocence, his ignorance, his naivete, qualities which had not yet left him even now. And clearly she feared she would lose him when he had again come into his own. Simply on the level of dealing daily with the world, she was far more competent than he, far more experienced, and that colored her view of him, making her see him as terrifying and childlike both at once. He understood that and took no issue with it, for, although fragments of his earlier self and princely education returned to him almost daily, and he grew daily more accustomed to the postures of command, most of his former identity still was inaccessible to him and he was, in large part, still Valentine the easy-going wanderer, Valentine the innocent, Valentine the juggler. That darker figure, the Lord Valentine he once had been, that he might someday be again, was a hidden substratum in his spirit, rarely operative but never to be ignored. He thought Carabella was making the best of a difficult position.

She said at last, "What are you thinking of, Valentine?"

"Sleet. I miss that tough little man."

"He’ll turn up. We’ll find him four islands from here."

"I hope so." Valentine cupped his arm about her shoulders. "I think also of all that has happened, and all that will happen. I move as though through a world of dreams, Carabella."

"Who can tell, really, what is the dream and what is not? We move as the Divine instructs us, and we ask no questions, because there are no answers. Do you know what I mean? There are questions and there are answers, of course. I can tell you what day this is, and what we had for dinner, and how this island is called, if you ask me, but there are no questions, there are no answers."

"So I believe also," Valentine said.

—6—

ZALZAN KAVOL HAD HIRED ONE of the grandest fishing-boats on the island, a marvelous turquoise trimaran named Pride of Mardigile. It was a splendid fifty-footer rising nobly on its three sleek hulls, and its sails, spotless and dazzling in the morning sunlight, bore bright vermilion edging that gave the craft a festive, jubilant air. Their captain was a man past middle years, one of the most prosperous fishermen of the island, Grigitor by name, tall and sturdy, with hair down to his waist and skin so vigorous it looked to have been oiled; he was one of those who had rescued Deliamber and Zalzan Kavol, when the first alarms of a sinking ship had reached the island. He had a crew of five, his sons and daughters, all strapping and handsome after his image.

The route of the voyage lay first toward Burbont, less than half an hour’s sail away, and then into an open channel of shallow greenish water that linked the two outermost islands to the rest. The sea-bottom here was of clean white sand, and sunlight penetrated easily to it, setting off patterns of sparkling coruscations that revealed the undersea dwellers, the rip-toads and the twitch-crabs and the big-leg lobsters, and the gaudy-hued multitudes of fish, and the sinister, lurking sand-eels. Once even a small sea-dragon flitted by, far too close to land for its own good and obviously confused; one of Grigitor’s daughters urged that they go after it, but he shook the notion off, saying that their responsibility was to get their passengers swiftly to Rodamaunt Graun.

All morning they sailed, passing three more islands — Richelure, Grialon, Voniaire, said their captain — and at noon they dropped anchor for lunch. Two of Grigitor’s children went over the side to hunt, moving like magnificent animals, naked in the brilliant water, quickly spearing crustaceans and fish with rarely a missed thrust. Grigitor himself prepared the meal, cubes of raw white flesh marinated in a spicy sauce and washed down with cheering pungent green wine. Deliamber withdrew after eating only a little, and perched himself on the tip of one of the outer hulls, staring intently to the north. After a while Valentine noticed, and would have gone to him, but Carabella caught him by the wrist.

"He is in trance," she said. "Let him be."

They delayed their departure after lunch by some minutes, until the little Vroon descended from his place and rejoined them. The wizard looked pleased.

"I have cast my mind forth," he announced, "and I bring you good news. Sleet lives!"

"Good news indeed!" Valentine cried. "Where is he?"

"An island in that group," said Deliamber, gesturing vaguely with a cluster of tentacles. "He is with several of Gorzval’s people who escaped by boat from the disaster."

Grigitor said, "Tell me which island, and we’ll make for it."

"It has the shape of a circle, with an opening at one side, and a body of water at its center. The people are dark-skinned and wear their hair in long ringlets, with jewels in their earlobes."

"Kangrisorn," said one of Grigitor’s daughters instantly.

Her father nodded. "Kangrisorn it is," he said. "Pull up anchor!"

Kangrisorn lay an hour to the windward, somewhat off the route Grigitor had chartered. It was one of half a dozen small sandy atolls, mere rings of upraised reef surrounding little lagoons, and it must have been uncommon for people of Mardigile to visit it, for long before the trimaran had entered the harbor children of Kangrisorn were flocking out in boats to view the strangers. They were as dark as the Mardigilese were golden, and just as beautiful in their solemn way, with shining white teeth and hair so black it seemed almost blue. With much laughter and waving of arms they guided the trimaran through the entrance to the lagoon, and there, squatting at the edge of the water, was Sleet indeed, looking sunburned and a bit ragged but mainly intact. He was juggling five or six globes of bleached white coral for an audience that consisted of a few dozen islanders and five members of Gorzval’s crew, four humans and a Hjort.

Gorzval seemed apprehensive at encountering his erstwhile employees. He had begun to recover his spirits during the morning’s voyage, but now he grew tense and withdrawn as the trimaran entered the lagoon. Carabella was the first off, splashing through the shallow water to embrace Sleet; Valentine followed close behind. Gorzval lurked to the rear, eyes lowered.

"How did you find us?" Sleet asked.

Valentine indicated Deliamber. "Sorcery. How else? Are you well?"

"I thought I’d die of seasickness getting here, but I’ve had a day or two to recover." With a shudder he said, "And you? I saw you sucked under, and believed all was over."

"So it seemed," said Valentine. "A strange story, which I’ll tell you another time. We are all together again, eh, Sleet? All but Gibor Haern," he added mournfully, "who perished in the wreck. But we’ve taken on Gorzval as one of our companions. Come forward, Gorzval! Aren’t you pleased to see your men again?"

Gorzval muttered something indistinct and looked between Valentine and the others, meeting no one’s eyes. Valentine comprehended the situation and turned to the crew people, meaning to ask them to hold no ill will toward the former captain for a disaster far beyond mortal control. He was taken aback to discover the five of them groveling at his feet.

Sleet said, abashed, "I thought you were dead, my lord. I couldn’t resist telling them my tale."

"I see," said Valentine, "that the news is apt to spread more rapidly than I wish, no matter how solemnly I swear you all to silence. Well, it’s pardonable, Sleet." To the others he said, "Up. Up. This crawling in the sand does none of us any good."

They rose. Their contempt for Gorzval was impossible for them to hide; but it was overshadowed by the astonishment they felt at being in the presence of the Coronal. Of the five, Valentine quickly learned, two — the Hjort and one of the humans — chose to remain on Kangrisorn in the hope of finding, eventually, some way to return to Piliplok and resume their trade. The other three begged to accompany him on his pilgrimage.

The new members of the rapidly expanding band were two women — Pandelon and Cordeine, a carpenter and a sailmender — and a man, Thesme, one of the winchwinders. Valentine bade them be welcome, and accepted pledges of allegiance from them, a ceremony that stirred vague discomfort in him. Yet he was growing accustomed to taking on these trappings of rank.

Grigitor and his children had paid no attention to the kneelings and hand-kissings among the passengers. Just as well: until he had conferred with the Lady, Valentine wished not to spread news across the world of his return to self-awareness. He was still uncertain of his strategy and unsure of his powers. Besides, if he advertised his existence he might draw the attention of the present Coronal, who was not likely to stay his hand if he discovered that a pretender was journeying toward Castle Mount.

The trimaran resumed its voyage. From isle to golden isle it went, staying well within the coastal channels and only occasionally venturing into deeper, bluer waters. Past Lormanar and Climidole they sailed, and Secundail, Blayhar Strand, Garhuven, and Wiswis Keep; past Quile and Fruil; past Dawnbreak, Nissemhold, and Thiaquil; past Roazen and Piplinat; and past the great crescent sand-spit known as Damozal. They stopped at the island of Sungyve for fresh water, at Musorn for fruit and leafy vegetables, at Cadibyre for casks of the young pink wine of that island. And after many days of traveling through these small sun-blessed places they pulled into the spacious harbor of Rodamaunt Graun.

This was a large lush island of mountainous origin, surrounded by black volcanic beaches and equipped along its southern shore with a splendid natural breakwater. Rodamaunt Graun was dominant in the Archipelago, by far the largest in the chain, with a population, so Grigitor asserted, of five and a half million. Twin cities spread out like wings from both sides of the harbor, but the flanks of the island’s looming central peak were also well populated, with dwellings of rattan and skupik-wood rising in neat ranks almost to mid-point. About the last line of houses the slopes were thickly covered with jungle, and at the highest level rose a plume of thin white smoke, for Rodamaunt Graun was an active volcano. The last eruption, said Grigitor, had occurred less than fifty years before. But that was hard to believe, when one looked at the impeccable houses and the unbroken forest growth above them.

Here the Pride of Mardigile would turn back for home, but Grigitor arranged for the voyagers to shift to a trimaran even more noble, the Rodamaunt Queen, which would carry them to the Isle of Sleep. Her skipper was one Namurinta, a woman of regal poise and bearing, with long straight hair as white as Sleet’s and a youthful, unlined face. Her manner was fastidious and quizzical: she studied her assortment of passengers closely, as if trying to determine what pull had drawn such a mixture into an off-season pilgrimage, but she said only, "If you are refused at the Isle, I will return you to Rodamaunt Graun, but there will be extra costs for your upkeep in that event."

"Does the Isle often refuse pilgrims?" Valentine asked.

"Not when they come at the proper time. But the pilgrim-ships, as I suppose you know, don’t sail in autumn. There may not be facilities ready for receiving you."

"We’ve come this far with only minor difficulties," said Valentine jauntily. He heard Carabella snicker and Sleet make stagy coughing sounds. "I feel confident," he went on, "that we’ll meet no obstacles greater than those we’ve already encountered."

"I admire your determination," Namurinta said, and signaled to her crew to prepare for departure.

The Archipelago in its eastern half hooked somewhat to the north, and the islands here were generally unlike Mardigile and its neighbors, being mainly the tops of a submerged mountain chain, not flat coral-based platforms. Studying Namurinta’s charts, Valentine concluded that this part of the Archipelago had once been a long tail of a peninsula jutting out of the southwest corner of the Isle of Sleep, but had been swallowed by some rising of the Inner Sea in ancient times. Only the tallest peaks had remained above water; and between the easternmost island of the Archipelago and the coast of the Isle there now lay some hundreds of miles of open sea — a formidable journey for a trimaran, even so well equipped a trimaran as Namurinta’s.

But the voyage was uneventful. They stopped at four ports — Hellirache, Sempifiore, Dimmid, and Guadeloom — for water and victuals, sailed on serenely past Rodamaunt Ounze, the last island of the Archipelago, and entered Ungehoyer Channel, which separated the Archipelago from the Isle of Sleep. This was a broad but shallow seaway, richly endowed with marine life and heavily fished by the island folk, all but the easternmost hundred miles, which formed part of the holy perimeter of the Isle. In these waters were monsters of a harmless kind, great balloon-shaped creatures known as volevants that anchored themselves to deep rocks and lived by filtering plankton through their gills; these creatures excreted a constant stream of nutrient matter, which sustained the enormous population of life-forms about them. Valentine saw dozens of volevants in the next few days: swollen globular sacks of a deep carmine hue, fifty to eighty feet across at their upper ends, plainly visible just a few feet below the calm surface. They bore dark semicircular markings on their skins, which Valentine imagined were eyes and noses and lips, so that he saw faces peering gravely up from the water, and it seemed to him that the volevants were beings of the deepest melancholy, philosophers of weight and wisdom reflecting eternally on the ebb and flow of the tides. "They sadden me," he told Carabella. "Forever hovering there, tied by their tails to hidden boulders, swaying slowly as the currents move them. How thoughtful they are!"

"Thoughtful! Primitive gasbags, no cleverer than a sponge!"

"But look carefully at them, Carabella. They want to fly, to soar — they look up at the sky, at the whole world of the air, and long to encounter it, but all they can do is hang below the waves, and sway, and fill themselves with invisible organisms. Just in front of their faces lies another world, and it would be death to them to enter it. Are you untouched by that?"

"Silly," Carabella said.

On the second day in the channel the Rodamaunt Queen came upon five fishing-boats that had uprooted a volevant, brought it to the surface, and slit it into gores; they clustered about the huge outspread skin of it, cutting it into smaller sections and stacking them like hides on their decks. Valentine was appalled. When I am Coronal again, he thought, I will prohibit the killing of these creatures, and then he looked at the thought in amazement, asking himself if it was his intention to promulgate laws on the basis of sympathies alone, without study of the facts. He asked Namurinta what use was made of volevant-skin.

"Medicinal," she replied. "For the comfort of the very old, when their blood flows sluggishly. One of them provides enough of the drug for all the islands for a year or more: what you see is a rare event."

When I am Coronal again, Valentine resolved, I will reserve judgment until I am in full possession of the truth, if such a thing is ever possible.

Nevertheless, the imagined solemn profundity of the volevants haunted him with strange emotions, and he was relieved to pass beyond their zone, and into the cool waters that bordered the Isle of Sleep.

—7—

THE ISLE NOW LAY CLEARLY in view to the east, growing perceptibly larger every hour. Valentine had seen it only in dreams and fantasies, and those based on nothing but his own imaginings and whatever residue of remembered reality still encrusted his mind; and he was not at all prepared for the actuality of the place.

It was immense. That should not have been surprising on a planet itself gigantic, and where so many things were in a scale with the planetary dimensions. But Valentine had misled himself into thinking an island necessarily was something of convenient and accessible scope. He had expected something perhaps two or three times as big as Rodamaunt Graun, which was foolishness: the Isle of Sleep, he saw now, spanned the entire horizon and looked as large from this distance as had the coast of Zimroel when they were a day or two out of Piliplok. An island it was, but by that token so too were Zimroel and Alhanroel and Suvrael; and the only reason the Isle was not called a continent, as were they, was that they were colossal, and the Isle merely very big.

And the Isle was dazzling. Like the promontory across the mouth of the river from Piliplok, it was ramparted by cliffs of pure white chalk that blazed brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. They formed a wall hundreds of feet high and perhaps hundreds of miles in length across the western face of the Isle. Atop that wall spread a dark-green crown of forest, and, so it seemed, there was a second wall of chalk inland at a higher elevation, topped also by forest, and then a third yet farther from the sea, so that the Isle from this side gave an appearance of tier upon tier of brightness, rising to some unknown and perhaps inaccessible central fastness. He had heard of the terraces of the Isle, which he gathered were artificial constructs of great age, symbolic markers of the ascent toward initiation. But the island itself seemed a place of terraces, natural ones, that enhanced its mystery. Small wonder that this place had become the abode of the sacred on Majipoor.

Namurinta said, pointing, "That notch in the cliff is Taleis, where the pilgrim-ships land. It’s one of the Isle’s two harbors; the other’s Numinor, over around Alhanroel side. But you must know all this, being pilgrims."

"We have had little time to study," said Valentine. "This pilgrimage came on us suddenly."

"Will you pass the rest of your lives here in the service of the Lady?" she asked.

"In the service of the Lady, yes," Valentine said. "But I think not here. The Isle is only a way-station for some of us, on a much greater journey."

Namurinta looked puzzled at that, but she asked no further questions.

The wind blew briskly from the southwest here, and carried the Rodamaunt Queen easily and swiftly toward Taleis. Soon the great chalk wall altogether filled the view, and the opening in it was revealed as no mere notch, but a harbor of heroic size, a huge gouge in the whiteness. With sails full, the trimaran entered. Valentine, in the bow, hair streaming in the breeze, was awestruck by the scope of the place, for within the sharp-angled V that was Taleis the cliffs descended almost vertically toward the water from a height of a mile or more, and at their base was a flat strip of land bordered by a broad white beach. At one side were wharfs and piers and docks, everything dwarfed by the scale of this gigantic amphitheater. It was hard to imagine how one could get from this port at the foot of the cliffs to the interior of the island: the place was a natural fortress.

And it was silent. There were no vessels in the harbor and an eerie echoing quietness prevailed, against which the sound of the wind or the screeching of an occasional gull took on magnified significance.

"Is there anyone here?" Sleet asked. "Who will greet us?"

Carabella closed her eyes. "To have to go around to the Numinor side now — worse, to return to the Archipelago—"

"No," Deliamber said. "We will be met. Fear nothing."

The trimaran glided toward the shore and came to rest at a vacant pier. The grandeur of the surroundings was overwhelming here, deep in the V of the harbor, with the cliffs rising so high they seemed to be on the verge of toppling. A crewman made the boat fast and they stepped forth.

Deliamber’s confidence seemed misplaced. There was no one here. Everything remained still, a silence so mighty that Valentine wanted to put his hands to his ears to shut it out. They waited. They exchanged uncertain glances.

"Let’s explore," he said finally. "Lisamon, Khun, Zalzan Kavol — examine the buildings to our left. Sleet, Deliamber, Vinorkis, Shanamir — down that way. You, Pandelon, Thesme, Rovorn — to that curve of the beach, and look beyond it. Gorzval, Erfon—"

Valentine, with Carabella and the sailmender Cordeine, went straight ahead, to the foot of the titanic chalk cliff. Some sort of pathway began there, and angled upward at an impossible slope, close to vertical, toward the upper reaches of the cliff, where it vanished between two white spires. Climbing that path would require the agility of a forest-brother and the gall of a tandy-prancer, Valentine decided. Yet no other place of exit from the beach was apparent. He peered into the small wooden shack at the base of the path and found nothing but a few floater-sleds, presumably used in riding the path. He hauled one out, set it on the thrusting-pad at ground level, and mounted it; but he saw no way of activating it.

Baffled, he returned to the pier. Most of the others had come back already. "The place is deserted," said Sleet.

Valentine looked toward Namurinta. "How long would it take you to carry us around to the Alhanroel side?"

"To Numinor? Weeks. But I would not go there."

"We have money," said Zalzan Kavol.

She looked indifferent. "My trade is fishing. The time of harvest for the thorn-fish is at hand. If I take you to Numinor, I will miss it, and half the gissoon season as well. You could not recompense me for that."

The Skandar produced a five-royal piece, as though by its glitter alone he could change the captain’s mind. But she shook it away.

"For half of what you paid me to bring you from Rodamaunt Graun to here, I’ll return you to Rodamaunt Graun, but that’s the best I can do for you. In a few months the pilgrim-ships will be sailing again and this harbor will come to life, and then, if you wish, I’ll bring you here again for the same half fee. However you decide, I am at your service. But I will sail from this place before it grows dark, and not for Numinor."

Valentine considered the situation. This was a greater nuisance than being swallowed by the sea-dragon; for he had quickly enough been set free from that, but this unexpected obstacle threatened to delay him well into winter, or even beyond, and all this while Dominin Barjazid ruled at Castle Mount, new laws went forth, history was altered, the usurper consolidated his position. But what then? He glanced at Deliamber, but the wizard, though he looked bland and untroubled, offered no suggestions. They could not climb this wall. They could not fly it. They could not leap in mighty bounds to the unreachable, infinitely desirable forest groves that cloaked its shoulders. Back to Rodamaunt Graun, then?

"Will you wait with us here a day?" Valentine asked. "For an additional fee, that is? Possibly in the morning we’ll find someone who—"

"I am far from Rodamaunt Graun," Namurinta replied. "I yearn to see its shores again. Waiting here another hour, even, would gain you nothing and me even less. The season is wrong; the people of the Lady expect no one to arrive at Taleis, and will not be here."

Shanamir tugged tightly at Valentine’s sleeves. "You are Coronal of Majipoor," the boy whispered, "Command her to wait! Reveal yourself and force her to her knees!"

Smiling, Valentine said softly, "I think the trick might not work. I’ve left my crown elsewhere."

"Then have Deliamber witch her into yielding!"

That was a possibility. But Valentine disliked it: Namurinta had taken them on in good faith, and by rights was free to leave, and probably was correct that waiting here another day or two or three was pointless. Compelling her to yield by Deliamber’s powers was distasteful to him. On the other hand—

"Lord Valentine!" a woman’s voice called, far away.

"Here! Come!"

He looked toward the far end of the harbor. It was Pandelon, Gorzval’s carpenter, who had gone with Thesme and Rovorn to inspect what lay around the curve. She was waving, beckoning. He sprinted down toward her, the others following after a moment.

When he reached her she led him through the shallow water around a jutting fold of rock that concealed a much smaller beach. There he saw a single-story structure of pink sandstone that bore the triangle-within-triangle emblem of the Lady and was perhaps some sort of shrine. In front of it was a garden of flowering shrubs arranged in symmetrical patterns of red, blue, orange, and yellow blossoms. Two gardeners, a man and a woman, were tending it. They looked up without interest as Valentine approached. Awkwardly he made the sign of the Lady at them, and they returned it more adeptly.

He said, "We are pilgrims, and need to be told the way to the terraces."

"You come out of season," the woman said. Her face was wide and pale, with a sprinkling of pale freckles on it. There was nothing friendly in her voice.

"Because of our eagerness to enter into the Lady’s service."

The woman shrugged and returned to her weeding. The man, a thick-muscled, short-statured person with thinning gray hair, said, "You should have gone to Numinor at this time of year."

"We came from Zimroel."

That produced a minor flicker of attention. "Through the dragon-winds? You must have had a difficult crossing."

"There were some troublesome moments," Valentine said, "but they lie behind us now. We feel only joy at having reached this Isle at last."

"The Lady will comfort you," said the man indifferently, and he began to work with a pruning-shears.

After a moment of silence that grew swiftly dismaying, Valentine said, "And the way to the terraces?"

The freckled woman said, "You won’t be able to operate it."

"But will you help us?"

Silence again.

Valentine said, "It would be only a moment, and then we’d disturb you no more. Show us the way."

"We have our duties here," said the balding man. Valentine moistened his lips. This was leading nowhere; and for all he knew, Namurinta had left the other beach five minutes ago and was on her way back to Rodamaunt Graun, marooning them. He looked to Deliamber. Some wizardly compulsion might be in order. Deliamber ignored the hint. Valentine moved toward him and murmured, "Touch your tentacles to them and inspire them to cooperate."

"I think my sorceries are of little value on this holy Isle," said Deliamber. "Try wizardries of your own."

"I have none!"

"Try," said the Vroon.

Valentine confronted the gardeners once again. I am Coronal of Majipoor, he told himself, and I am the son of the Lady whom these two worship and serve. It was impossible to say any of that to the gardeners, but he could transmit it, perhaps, through sheer force of soul. He stood tall and moved toward the center of his being, as he would have done if he were preparing to juggle before the most critical of audiences, and he smiled a smile so warm it might have opened buds on the branches of the flowering shrubs, and after a moment the gardeners, looking up from their work, saw it and showed an unmistakable response, a reaction of surprise, bewilderment, and — submission. He bathed them in glowing love. "We have come thousands of miles," he said gently, "to give ourselves up to the peace of the Lady, and we beg you, in the name of the Divine that we both serve, to assist us on our pathway; for our need is great and we are weary of wandering."

They blinked, as if the sun had emerged from behind a gray cloud.

"We have our tasks," said the woman lamely.

"We are not supposed to ascend until the garden is cared for," the man said, almost in a mumble.

"The garden thrives," said Valentine, "and will thrive without your aid for a few hours today. Help us, before the darkness comes. We ask only that you point us on our way, and I tell you that the Lady will reward you for it."

The gardeners looked troubled. They glanced at one another, and then toward the sky, as though to see how late it was. Frowning, they rose and brushed the sandy soil from their knees, and, like sleepwalkers, moved to the water’s edge, and out into the light surf, and around the point to the greater beach, and down toward the foot of the cliff where that vertical path began its skyward climb.

Namurinta was still there, but she was nearly ready for departure. Valentine went to her.

"For your aid we thank you deeply," he said.

"You are staying?"

"We have found a way to the terraces."

She smiled in unfeigned pleasure. "I was not eager to abandon you, but Rodamaunt Graun was calling me. I wish you well as you make your pilgrimage."

"And I wish you a safe voyage home."

He turned away.

"One thing," the captain said.

"Yes?"

"When the woman called to you from down there," she said, "she hailed you as Lord Valentine. What was the meaning of that?"

"A joke," said Valentine. "Only a joke."

"Lord Valentine is how the new Coronal is named, so I have been told, the one that rules since a year or two past."

"Yes," Valentine said. "But he is a dark-haired man. It was only a joke, a play on names, for I am Valentine too. A safe journey, Namurinta."

"A fruitful pilgrimage, Valentine."

He walked toward the cliff. The gardeners had taken several of the floater-sleds from the shack, and had placed them in riding sequence on the thrusting-pad. Silently they gestured the travelers aboard. Valentine mounted the first sled, with Carabella, Deliamber, Shanamir, and Khun. The female gardener went into the shack, where, it seemed, the controls of the floaters must be located, for an instant afterward the sled drifted free of the pad and began the dizzying, terrifying ascent of the towering white cliff.

—8—

"You HAVE COME," said the acolyte Talinot Esulde, "to the Terrace of Assessment. Here you will be weighed in the balance. When it is time to move onward, your path takes you to the Terrace of Inception, and then to the Terrace of Mirrors, where you will confront yourself. If what you see is satisfactory to you and to your guides, you move inward to Second Cliff, where another group of terraces awaits you. And so you proceed until the Terrace of Adoration. There, if the favor of the Lady is upon you, you will receive your summons to Inner Temple. But I would not expect that to happen quickly. I would not expect that to happen at all. Those who expect to attain the Lady are the least likely to reach her."

Valentine’s mood darkened at that, for not only did he expect to attain the Lady, it was absolutely vital that he do so; and yet he understood what the acolyte was saying. In this holy place one made no demands on the fabric of existence. One surrendered; one gave up demands and needs and desires; one yielded, if one hoped to find peace. This was no place for a Coronal. The essence of a Coronal’s being was the wielding of power, wisely if he was capable of wisdom, but in any event steadfastly; the essence of a pilgrim was surrender. In that contradiction he might easily be lost. Yet he had no choice but to go to the Lady.

He had, at least, reached the outer fringes of the Lady’s domain. At the top of the cliff they had been greeted by unsurprised acolytes, plainly aware that out-of-season pilgrims were floating toward them. And now, looking pious and faintly absurd in the soft pale robes of pilgrims, they were gathered in a low long building of smooth pink stone near the crest of the cliff. Flags of the same pink stone formed a massive semicircular promenade that stretched for what appeared to be a great distance along the edge of the forest that topped the cliff: this was the Terrace of Assessment. Beyond it lay more forest; the other terraces were farther beyond; and deeper in, not visible from where they were now, rose the second chalk cliff atop the plateau that the outer one formed. A third cliff yet, Valentine knew, rose above the second somewhere hundreds of miles inland, and this was the holiest precinct, where Inner Temple was, where the Lady dwelled. For all that he had traveled so far, it seemed impossible that he would ever complete those last hundreds of miles.

Night was falling swiftly. He could look back through the circular window behind him and see the darkening sky and the broad dark bosom of the sea, lit only by the purpling light of the vanishing sun as it fled toward Piliplok. There was a speck out there, a scratch on the smooth surface of the water, that he thought and hoped was the trimaran Rodamaunt Queen, heading homeward, and out there too were the volevants dreaming their endless dream, and the sea-dragons making their way toward a greater sea, and beyond all that was Zimroel, its teeming cities, its forest preserves and park-lands, its festivals, its billions of souls. There was much for him to look back on; but now he must look forward. He stared intently at Talinot Esulde, their first guide in this place, a tall slender person with milk-white skin and a shaven skull, who might be of either sex. Male was Valentine’s guess — the height and something about the breadth of shoulders argued that, though not absolutely — but the delicacy of Talinot Esulde’s facial bones, notably the fragile curve of the light ridges above the strange blue eyes, argued otherwise.

Talinot Esulde was explaining things: the daily routine of prayer and work and meditation, the system of dream-speaking, the arrangement of living-quarters, the dietary restrictions, which excluded all wines and certain spices, and much else. Valentine tried to master it all, but there were so many regulations and requirements and obligations and customs that they tangled in his mind, and he ceased making the effort after a time, hoping that daily practice would instill the rules in him.

As darkness came Talinot Esulde led them from the indoctrination hall, past the sparkling spring-fed rock pool where they had been bathed before being given their robes and where they would bathe twice each day until they left this terrace, and to the dining-hall, farther from the cliffs rim. Here they were served a simple meal of soup and fish, flavorless and unappealing even though they were furiously hungry. Their servitors were novices like themselves, in robes of light green. The hall, a large one, was only partly full — the hour for dining was almost past, Talinot Esulde pointed out. Valentine looked at his fellow pilgrims. They were of all sorts, perhaps half of human stock, but also a great many Vroons and Ghayrogs, a sprinkling of Skandars, some Liimen, some Hjorts though not very many, and, far across the way, a little insular Su-Suheris group. The net of the Lady caught all the races of Majipoor, it would seem. All but one. "Do Metamorphs ever seek the Lady?" Valentine asked.

Talinot Esulde smiled seraphically. "If a Piurivar came to us, we would accept it. But they take no part in our rites. They live to themselves as though they were alone on all of Majipoor."

"Perhaps some have come here disguised in other forms," Sleet suggested.

"We would know that," said Talinot Esulde calmly. After dinner they were taken to their rooms — individual chambers, hardly bigger than closets, in a hivelike lodge. A couch, a sink, a place for clothes, and nothing more. Lisamon Hultin glowered at hers. "No wine," she said, "and I give up my sword, and now I sleep in this box? I think I’m going to be a failure as a pilgrim, Valentine."

"Peace, and make the effort. We’ll travel through the Isle as swiftly as we can."

He entered his room, which was between the warrior-woman’s and Carabella’s. Immediately the lightglobe dimmed, and when he settled in on his couch he found himself disappearing instantly into slumber, though the hour was still early. As consciousness left him a new light glowed softly in his mind, and he beheld the Lady, the unmistakable, unquestionable Lady of the Isle.

Valentine had seen her in dreams many times before since Pidruid, the gentle eyes, the dark hair, the flower at her ear, the olive-hued skin, but now the image was sharper, the vision more detailed, and he noticed the small lines in the corners of her eyes and the tiny green jewels set in her earlobes and the thin silver band that encircled her brow. In his dream he held his hands to her and said, "Mother, here I am. Call me to you, mother."

She smiled at him, but she made no answer.

They were in a garden, with alabandinas in bloom all about them. She nipped at the plants with a small golden implement, clipping away flowerbuds so the remaining ones would yield larger blossoms. He stood beside her, waiting for her to turn to him, but the work of nipping went on and on, and finally she said, still not looking his way, "One must give constant attention to one’s task if it is to be done properly."

"Mother, I am Valentine your son!"

"See, each branch has five buds? Let them be and they all will open, but I take two away here, one here, one here, and the blooms are glorious." And as she spoke the buds unfurled, and the alabandinas filled the air with a fragrance so keen it stunned him, while the great yellow petals stretched forth like platters, revealing the black stamens and pistils within. She touched them lightly, sending a scattering of purple pollen into the air. And said, "You are who you are, and always will be." The dream changed then, with nothing of the Lady remaining in it, but only a bower of thorny bushes waving rigid arms at him, and moleeka-birds of colossal size strutting about, and other images, confused and ever-altering and telling him nothing that had coherent pattern.

When he woke he was expected to report at once to his dream-speaker, not Talinot Esulde but another acolyte of the guide level, this a person named Stauminaup, shaven also and also of ambiguous sex, but more likely than not a woman. These acolytes were of a medium level of initiation, Valentine had learned yesterday. They returned from Second Cliff to serve the needs of novices here.

Dream-speaking on the Isle was nothing like that which he had experienced in Falkynkip with Tisana. There were no drugs, there was no lying-together of bodies. He merely came into the presence of the speaker and described his dream. Stauminaup listened impassively. Valentine suspected that the speaker had had access to his dream as he was experiencing it, and merely wanted to contrast Valentine’s account of it with her own perceptions, to see what gulfs and contradictions might lie between. Therefore he presented the dream exactly as he recalled it, saying, as he had in sleep, "Mother, I am Valentine your son!" and studying Stauminaup for a reaction to that. But he might as well have been studying the chalk face of the cliff.

When he was done the speaker said, "And what color were the alabandina blooms?"

"Why, yellow, with black centers!"

"A lovely flower. In Zimroel the alabandinas are scarlet, and yellow at the center. Do you like the colors of yours better?"

"I have no preference," said Valentine.

Stauminaup smiled. "The alabandinas of Alhanroel are yellow, with black centers. You may go now."

The speakings were much the same every day: a cryptic comment, or one that was perhaps not so cryptic, but lay open to varying interpretations, only no interpretations ever were offered. Stauminaup was like a repository for his dreams, absorbing them without providing counsel. Valentine became accustomed to that.

He became accustomed, too, to the daily routines of labor. He worked in the garden two hours each morning, doing minor trimming and weeding and much turning of soil, and in the afternoons he was a mason, taking instruction in the art of pointing the flagstones of the terrace. There were long sessions of meditation in which he was given no guidance whatever, only sent off to his room to stare at the walls. He saw hardly anything of his companions of the journey, except when they bathed together, at mid-morning and again just before dinner, in the sparkling pool; and they had little to say. It was easy to get into the rhythm of this place and cast aside all urgencies. The tropic air, the perfume of millions of blossoms, the gentle tone of everything that went on here, lulled and soothed like a warm bath.

But Alhanroel lay thousands of miles to the east, and he was moving not an inch toward his goal so long as he remained at the Terrace of Assessment. Already a week had gone by. During his meditation sessions Valentine entertained fantasies of collecting his people and slipping away by night, passing illicitly through terrace after terrace, scaling Second Cliff and Third, presenting himself ultimately to the Lady at the threshold of her temple; but he suspected they would not get far, in a place where dreams were open books.

So he fretted. He knew that fretting would win him no advancement here, and he taught himself instead to relax, to give himself up utterly to his tasks, to clear his mind of all needs and compulsions and attachments, and thus to open the way toward the dream of summoning by which the Lady would beckon him inward. That had no effect either. He plucked weeds, he cultivated the warm rich soil, he carried buckets of mortar and grout to the farthest reaches of the terrace, he sat cross-legged in his meditation hours with his mind entirely empty, and night after night he went to bed praying that the Lady would appear and tell him, "It is time for you to come to me," but nothing happened.

"How long will this continue?" he asked Deliamber at the pool one day. "It’s the fifth week! Or maybe the sixth — I’m losing count. Do I stay here a year? Two? Five?"

"Some of the pilgrims among us have done just that," said the Vroon. "I spoke with one, a Hjort who served in patrols under Lord Voriax. She has spent four years here and seems quite resigned to staying at the outermost terrace forever."

"She has no need to go elsewhere. This is a pleasant enough inn, Deliamber. But I—"

" — have urgent appointments to the east," Deliamber said. "And therefore you are condemned to remain here. There’s a paradox in your dilemma, Valentine. You strive to renounce purpose; but your renunciation itself has a purpose. Do you see? Your speaker surely does."

"Of course I see. But what do I do? How do I pretend not to care whether I stay here forever?"

"Pretense is impossible. The moment you genuinely don’t care, you’ll move onward. Not until then."

Valentine shook his head. "That’s like telling me that my salvation depends on never thinking of gihorna-birds. The harder I’d try not to think of them, the more flocks of gihornas would fly through my mind. What am I to do, Deliamber?"

But Deliamber had no other suggestions. The next day, Valentine learned that Shanamir and Vinorkis had received advancement to the Terrace of Inception.

Two more days passed before Valentine saw Deliamber again. The wizard remarked that Valentine did not look well; and Valentine replied, with an impatience he could not control, "How do you expect me to look? Do you know how many weeds I’ve pulled, how much masonry I’ve pointed, while in Alhanroel a Barjazid sits on Castle Mount and—"

"Peace," Deliamber said softly. "This is not like you."

"Peace? Peace? How long can I be peaceful?"

"Perhaps your patience is being tested. In which case, my lord, you are failing the test."

Valentine considered that. After a moment he said, "I admit your logic. But perhaps it’s my ingenuity that’s being tested. Deliamber, put a summoning-dream into my head tonight."

"My sorceries, you know, seem of little value on this island."

"Do it. Try it. Concoct a message from the Lady and plant it in my mind, and then we’ll see."

Deliamber, shrugging, touched his tentacles to Valentine’s hands for the moment of thought-transference. Valentine felt the faint distant tingle of contact. "Your sorceries still work," he said. And that night there came to him a dream in which he drifted like a volevant in the bathing-pool, attached to the rocks by some membrane that had sprouted from his feet, and as he sought to free himself the face of the Lady appeared, smiling, in the night sky, and whispered to him, "Come, Valentine, come to me, come," and the membrane dissolved, and he floated upward and soared on the breeze, borne by the wind toward Inner Temple.

Valentine relayed the dream to Stauminaup in his dream-speaking session. She listened as though he were telling her of a dream of plucking weeds in the garden. The next night Valentine pretended he had had the same dream, and again she made no comment. He offered the dream on the next, and asked for a speaking of it.

Stauminaup said, "The speaking of your dream is that no bird flies with another’s wings."

His cheeks reddened. He went slinking away from her chamber.

Five days later, he was told by Talinot Esulde that he had been granted admission to the Terrace of Inception.

"But why?" he asked Deliamber.

The Vroon replied, "Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress. Obviously something has altered in you."

"But I’ve had no legitimate summoning dream!"

"Perhaps you have," said the sorcerer.

One of the acolytes took him, by foot, through the forest paths to the next terrace. The road was a maze, zigzagging, bewilderingly, several times requiring them to turn in what seemed like precisely the wrong direction. Valentine was altogether lost by the time they emerged, some hours later, into a cleared area of immense size. Pyramids of dark-blue stone ten feet high rose there at regular intervals from the pink flag-stone of the terrace.

Life was much the same here — menial tasks, meditation, daily dream-speaking, stark ascetic quarters, drab food. But there was also the beginning of holy instruction, an hour each afternoon in which the principles of the grace of the Lady were explained by means of elliptical parables and circuitous dialogues.

Valentine listened restlessly to all that at first. It seemed vague and abstract to him, and it was hard to concentrate on such cloudy matters when what possessed him was a direct political passion — to reach Castle Mount and settle the questioning of the governing of Majipoor. But by the third day it struck him that what the acolyte was saying about the role of the Lady was entirely political. She was a tempering force, Valentine realized, a mortar of love and faith binding together the centers of power on this world. However she worked her magic of dream-sending — and it was impossible to believe the popular myth, that she was in touch with the minds of millions of people every night — it was clear that her calm spirit soothed and eased the planet. The apparatus of the King of Dreams, Valentine knew, sent direct and specific dreams that lashed the guilty and admonished the uncertain, and the sendings of the King could be fierce. But as the warmth of the ocean moderates the climate of the land, so did the Lady make gentle the harsh forces of control on Majipoor, and the theology that had arisen around the person of the Lady as Divine Mother Incarnate was, Valentine now understood, only a metaphor for the division of power that the early rulers of Majipoor had devised.

So he listened with keener interest. He put aside his eagerness to move to loftier terraces for a time, in order to learn more here.

Valentine was entirely alone at this terrace. That was new. Shanamir and Vinorkis were nowhere to be seen — had they been sent on already to the Terrace of Mirrors? — and the rest, so far as he knew, remained behind. Most of all he missed Carabella’s sparkling energies and Deliamber’s sardonic wisdom, but the others too had become part of his soul in the long difficult journey across Zimroel, and not to have them about him here was discomforting. His days as a juggler seemed long gone and never to be recaptured. Occasionally now he would, in leisure moments, take fruits from the trees and toss them in the old familiar patterns, to the amusement of passing novices and acolytes. One in particular, a thick-shouldered black-bearded man named Farssal, made a point of watching closely whenever Valentine juggled.

"Where did you learn those arts?" Farssal asked.

"In Pidruid," Valentine said. "I was with a juggling troupe."

"It must have been a fine life."

"It was," said Valentine, remembering the excitement of standing before the dark-visaged Lord Valentine in the arena at Pidruid, and of stepping out onto the vast stage of Dulorn’s Perpetual Circus, and all the rest, unforgettable scenes of his past.

Farssal said, "Can those skills be taught, or is it an inborn knack?"

"Anyone can learn, anyone with a quick eye and the willingness to concentrate. I learned myself in just a week or two, last year in Pidruid."

"No! Surely you’ve juggled all your life!"

"Not before last year."

"What led you to take it up, then?"

Valentine smiled. "I needed a livelihood, and there were traveling jugglers in Pidruid for the Coronal’s festival, who had need of an extra pair of hands. They taught me quickly, as I could teach you."

"You could, do you think?"

"Here," Valentine said, and tossed the black-bearded man one of the fruits he was juggling, a firm green bishawar. "Throw that back and forth between your hands awhile, to loosen your fingers. You must master a few basic positions, and certain habits of perception, which will take practice, and then—"

"What did you do before you were a juggler?" asked Farssal as he tossed the fruit.

"I wandered about," said Valentine. "Here: hold your hands in this fashion—"

He drilled Farssal half an hour, trying to train him as Carabella and Sleet had done for him at the inn in Pidruid. It was a welcome diversion in this placid and monotonous life. Farssal had quick hands and good eyes, and learned rapidly, though not nearly so rapidly as Valentine had. Within a few days he had developed most of the elementary skills and could juggle after a fashion, though not gracefully. He was an outgoing and talkative man, who kept up a steady flow of conversation as he flipped the bishawars from hand to hand. Born in Ni-moya, he said; for many years a merchant in Piliplok; recently overtaken by a spiritual crisis that had thrust him into confusion and then sent him on the Isle pilgrimage. He talked of his marriage, his unreliable sons, his winning and losing huge fortunes at the gaming-tables; and he wanted to know all about Valentine as well, his family, his ambitions, the motives that had brought him to the Lady. Valentine dealt with these queries as plausibly as he could, and turned aside the most awkward ones with quickly contrived dissertations on the art of juggling.

At the end of the second week — toil, study, meditation, periods of free time spent juggling with Farssal, a stable and static round — Valentine felt restlessness coming over him again, the yearning to be moving onward.

He had no idea how many terraces there were — nine? ninety? — but if he spent this much time at each, he might be years in reaching the Lady. Some means of abbreviating the process of ascent was needed.

Counterfeit summoning-dreams did not seem to work. He trotted forth his drifting-in-the-pool dream for Silimein, his dream-speaker here, but she was no more impressed by it than Stauminaup had been. He tried, during his meditation periods and when he was falling asleep at night, to reach forth to the mind of the Lady and implore her to summon him. This produced nothing useful either.

He asked those who sat near him in the dining-hall how long they had been at the Terrace of Inception. "Two years," said one. "Eight months," said another. They looked untroubled.

"And you?" he asked Farssal.

Farssal said he had arrived only a few days before Valentine. But he felt no impatience about moving on. "There’s no hurry, is there? We serve the Lady wherever we may be, don’t you think? So one terrace is as good as another." Valentine nodded. He hardly dared disagree. Late in the third week he thought he caught sight of Vinorkis far across the field of stajja where he was working. But he was not sure — was that a flash of orange on that Hjort’s whiskers? — and the distance was too great for shouting. The next day, though, as Valentine stood casually juggling with Farssal near the bathing-pool, he saw Vinorkis, unquestionably Vinorkis, watching from the other side of the plaza. Valentine excused himself and jogged over. After so many weeks sundered from his old companions here, even the Hjort was a welcome sight.

"Then it was you in the stajja-fields," Valentine said. Vinorkis nodded. "These past few days I’ve had several glimpses of you, my lord. But the terrace is so huge — I’ve never been able to come close. When did you arrive?"

"About a week after you. Are there others of us here?"

"Not so far as I know," the Hjort replied. "Shanamir was, but he’s moved on. I see you’ve lost none of your juggling skill, my lord. Who’s your partner?"

"A man of Piliplok. Quick with his hands."

"And with his tongue as well?"

Valentine frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Have you said much to this man of your past, my lord, or of your future?"

"Of course not." Valentine stared. "No, Vinorkis! Surely no spies of the Coronal right here on the Lady’s own Isle!"

"Why not? Is it so hard to infiltrate this place?"

"But why do you suspect—"

"Last night, after I glimpsed you in the fields, I came here to make inquiry about you. One of those I spoke to was your new friend, my lord. Asked him if he knew you and he started questioning me. Was I your friend, had I known you in Pidruid, why had we come to the Isle, and so on and so on. My lord, I am uneasy when strangers ask questions. Especially in this place, where one is taught to remain apart from others."

"You may be too suspicious, Vinorkis."

"Maybe so. But guard yourself anyway, my lord."

"That I will," said Valentine. "He’ll learn nothing from me but what he’s already had. Which is merely some juggling."

"He may already know too much about you," said the Hjort gloomily. "But let us watch him, even as he watches you."

The notion that he might be under surveillance even here dismayed him. Was there no sanctuary? Valentine wished he had Sleet beside him, or Deliamber. A spy now might well become an assassin later, as Valentine drew closer to the Lady and became that much more of a peril to the usurper.

But Valentine seemed to be drawing no closer to the Lady. Another week went by in the same fashion as before. Then, just as he was coming to believe he would spend the rest of his days at the Terrace of Inception, and when he was reaching a point where it mattered little to him if he did, he was called from the fields and told to make ready to go on to the Terrace of Mirrors.

—9—

THIS THIRD TERRACE WAS A place of dazzling beauty, with a glitter that reminded Valentine of Dulorn. It nestled against the base of Second Cliff, a forbidding vertical wall of white chalk that seemed an absolute barrier to further inward progress, and when the sun was in the west the face of the cliff was such a wonder of reflected brilliance that it stunned the eye and wrung gasps of awe from the soul.

Then, too, there were the mirrors — great rough-hewn slabs of polished black stone set edgewise in the ground everywhere about this terrace, so that wherever one looked one encountered one’s own image, glowing against a shining inner light. Valentine at first studied himself critically, searching for the changes that his journey had brought upon him, some dimming of the warm radiance that had flowed from him since the Pidruid days, or perhaps marks of weariness or stress. But he saw none of that, only the familiar golden-haired smiling man, and he waved to himself and winked amiably and saluted, and then, after a week or so, ceased to notice his reflection at all. If he had been ordered to ignore the mirrors he would probably have lived in guilty tension, flicking his gaze involuntarily toward them and wrenching it away; but no one here told him what purpose the mirrors served or what attitude he should take toward them, and in time he simply forgot them. This, he realized much later, was the key to forward movement on the Isle: evolution of the spirit from within, a growing ability to discern and discard the irrelevant.

He was entirely alone here. No Shanamir, no Vinorkis, and no Farssal. Valentine kept close watch for the black-bearded man: if indeed he was some sort of spy, he would doubtless find a way to follow Valentine from terrace to terrace. But Farssal did not arrive.

Valentine stayed at the Terrace of Mirrors eleven days and went onward, in the company of five other novices, via a floater-sled to the rim of Second Cliff and the Terrace of Consecration.

From here there was a magnificent view back over the first three terraces, far below, to the distant sea. Valentine could barely see the Terrace of Assessment — only a thin line of pink against the dark green of the forest — but the great Terrace of Inception spread out awesomely at the mid-point of the lower plateau, and the Terrace of Mirrors, just below, blazed like a million bright pyres in noonday light.

It was becoming unimportant to him, now, how swift his pace might be. Time was losing its meaning. He had slipped entirely into the rhythm of the place. He worked in the fields; he attended lengthy sessions of spiritual instruction; he spent much of his time in the darkened stone-roofed building that was the shrine of the Lady, asking, in a way that was not really asking at all, that illumination be granted him. Occasionally he remembered that he had intended to go quickly to the heart of the Isle and to the woman who dwelled there. But there seemed little urgency to any of that now. He had become a true pilgrim.

Beyond the Terrace of Consecration lay the Terrace of Flowers, and beyond that the Terrace of Devotion, and then the Terrace of Surrender. All these were of Second Cliff, as was the Terrace of Ascent, which was the final stage before one went up onto the plateau where the Lady lived. Each of the terraces. Valentine came to understand, completely encircled the island, so that there might be a million votaries in each at any time, or even more, and each pilgrim saw only a tiny segment of the whole as he pursued his course toward the center. How much effort had gone into constructing all this! How many lives had been given over entirely to the Lady’s service! And each pilgrim moved within a sphere of silence: no friendships were begun here, no confidences were exchanged, no lovers embraced. Farssal had been a mysterious exception to that custom. It was as though this place existed outside of time and apart from the ordinary rituals of life.

In this middle zone of the Isle there was less emphasis on teaching, more on toil. When he reached Third Cliff, he knew, he would join those who actually carried out the Lady’s work in the world at large; for it was not the Lady herself, he now understood, who emanated most sendings to the world, but rather the millions of advanced acolytes of Third Cliff, whose minds and spirits became amplifiers for the Lady’s benevolence. Not that everyone reached Third Cliff: many of the older acolytes, he gathered, had spent decades on Second Cliff, performing administrative tasks, with neither the hope nor the desire of moving toward the more taxing responsibilities of the inner zone.

In his third week at the Terrace of Devotion, Valentine was granted what he knew to be an unmistakable summoning-dream.

He saw himself crossing that parched purple plain that had darkened his sleep in Pidruid. The sun was low at the horizon and the sky was harsh and bleak, and ahead of him lay two broad mountain ranges that rose like giant swollen fists. In the jagged boulder-strewn valley between them the last ruddy glimmer of sunlight was visible, a peculiar oily light, ominous, more a stain than a radiance. A cool dry wind blew out of that strangely illuminated valley, and on it came sighing, singing sounds, soft melancholy melodies riding the breeze. Valentine walked for hours but made no progress: the mountains grew no nearer, the desert sands extended themselves infinitely as he trekked, that last shard of light did not depart. His strength was ebbing. Menacing mirages danced before him. He saw Simonan Barjazid, the King of Dreams, and his three sons. He saw the ghastly senile Pontifex roaring on his subterranean throne. He saw monstrous amorflbot crawling sluggishly in the dunes, and the snouts of massive dhumkars rising like augers out of the sands, probing the air for prey. Things hissed and twanged and whispered; insects swarmed in nasty little clouds; a rain of dry sand began to fall, lightly, clogging his eyes and nostrils. He was weary and ready at any moment to yield and halt, to lie down in the sand and let the shifting dunes cover him, but one thing drew him on, for in the valley a glowing figure moved to and fro, a smiling woman, the Lady his mother, and so long as she could be seen there he would not cease pressing forward. He felt the warmth of her presence, the pull of her love. "Come," she murmured. "Come to me, Valentine!" Her arms reached toward him across that terrible desert of monstrosities. His shoulders sagged. His knees weakened. He could not continue, though he knew he must. "Lady," he whispered, "I am at my end, I must rest, I must sleep!" At that the glow between the mountains grew warmer and brighter. "Valentine," she called. "Valentine, my son!" He could scarcely keep his eyes open. It was so tempting to lie down in the warm sand. "You are my son," came the voice of the Lady across that impossible distance, "and I have need of you," and as she said these words he found new strength, and walked more rapidly, and then began to run lightly over the hard, crusted desert floor, his heart lifting, his stride widening. Now the distances quickly dwindled, and Valentine could see her clearly, awaiting him on a terrace of violet-hued stone, smiling, reaching to him with outstretched arms, calling his name in a voice that rang like the bells of Ni-moya.

He awoke with the sound of her voice still ringing in his mind.

It was dawn. Wondrous energy flooded his spirit. He rose and went down to the great amethystine basin that was the bathing-pool at the Terrace of Devotion, and plunged boldly into the chilly spring-water. Afterward he trotted to the chamber of Menesipta, his dream-speaker here, a compact, fine-honed person with flashing dark eyes and a taut, spare face, and poured forth the dream to her in one long rush of words.

Menesipta sat silently.

The coolness of her response dampened Valentine’s exuberance. He remembered going to Stauminaup at the Terrace of Assessment with the fraudulent summoning-dream of the volevant, and how swiftly Stauminaup had dismissed that dream. But this was no fraud. He had no Deliamber here to do witcheries on his mind.

Valentine said at length, "May I ask an evaluation?"

"The dream has familiar overtones," Menesipta replied calmly.

"Is that your whole speaking of it?"

She seemed amused. "What more would you have me say?"

Valentine clenched his fists in frustration. "If someone came to me for a speaking of such a dream, I would call it a dream of summoning."

"Very well."

"Do you agree? Would you call it a dream of summoning?"

"If it would please you."

"Pleasing me isn’t the point," said Valentine, irritated. "Either the dream was a dream of summoning or it wasn’t. What is your view of it?"

Smiling obliquely, the dream-speaker said, "I call your dream a dream of summoning."

"And now?"

"Now? Now you have your morning duties to observe."

"A dream of summoning, as I understand it," said Valentine tightly, "is required in order to attain the presence of the Lady."

"Indeed."

"Should I not advance now to Inner Temple?"

Menesipta shook her head. "No one goes from Second Cliff to Inner Temple. Only when you reach the Terrace of Adoration does a summoning-dream suffice of itself to call you inward. Your dream is interesting and important, but it changes nothing. Go to your duties, Valentine."

Anger throbbed in him as he left her chamber. He knew he was being foolish, that a mere dream could not be enough to sweep him past the remaining hurdles that separated him from the Lady, and yet he had expected so much from it — he had hoped Menesipta would clap her hands and cry out in joy and ship him at once to Inner Temple, and none of that had happened, and the letdown was painful and infuriating.

More pain ensued. As he came from the fields two hours later an acolyte intercepted him and said bluntly, "You are ordered immediately to the harbor at Taleis, where new pilgrims await your guidance."

Valentine was stunned. The last thing he wanted now was to be sent back to the starting point.

He was to set out at once, on foot and alone, making his way outward from terrace to terrace and getting himself to the Terrace of Assessment in the shortest possible time. They provided him at the terrace commissary with enough food to see him as far as the Terrace of Flowers. They gave him also a direction-finding device, an amulet to be fastened to his arm, that would scan for buried roadmarkers and emit a soft high pinging sound.

At midday he left the Terrace of Devotion. But the path he chose was the one inward toward the Terrace of Surrender, not the one that would take him back toward the coast.

The decision came suddenly and with unarguable force. He simply could not allow himself to be turned away from the Lady. Slipping off on an unauthorized trek, on this highly disciplined island, held serious risks, but he had no choice.

Valentine circled past the rim of the terrace and found the grassy path that cut diagonally across the recreation field to the main road. There he was supposed to turn left toward the outer terraces. But — feeling extraordinarily conspicuous — he turned right instead and set out briskly toward the interior. Soon he was beyond the settled part of the terrace and the road had narrowed from wide paved highway to earthen track, with forest pressing close on all sides.

Within half an hour he was at a fork in the road. When he started at random down the left-hand branch, the quiet pinging tone of the direction-finding amulet vanished, returning when he had made his way back to the other fork. A useful device, he thought.

He walked steadily until nightfall. Then he camped in a pleasant grove beside a gentle stream, and allowed himself a sparing meal of cheese and sliced meat. He slept fitfully, stretched out on the cool moist ground between two slender trees.

The first pink glimmer of dawn woke him. He stirred, stretched, opened his eyes. A quick splash in the stream, yes, and then a bit of breakfast, and then—

Valentine heard sounds in the forest behind him — twigs snapping, something moving through the bushes. Quietly he slipped behind a thick-trunked tree by the edge of the stream and peered warily around it. And saw a powerfully built black-bearded man emerge from the underbrush, pause by his campsite, look cautiously about.

Farssal.

In a pilgrim’s robe. But with a dagger strapped to his left forearm.

Some twenty-five feet separated the two men. Valentine frowned, considered his options, calculated tactics. Where had Farssal found a dagger on this peaceful island? Why was he tracking Valentine through the forest, if not to slay him?

Violence was alien to Valentine. But to take Farssal by surprise seemed the only course that made sense. He rocked back and forth a moment on the balls of his feet, centered his mind as though he were about to juggle, and sprang from his hiding place.

Farssal whirled and managed to get the dagger from its scabbard just as Valentine crashed into him. With a sudden desperate hacking motion Valentine slammed the side of his hand into the underside of Farssal’s arm, numbing it, and the dagger dropped to the ground; but an instant later Farssal’s meaty arms wrapped Valentine in a crushing grip.

They stood locked, face to face. Farssal was a head shorter than Valentine, but deeper of chest, broader of shoulder, a bull-bodied man. He strained to throw Valentine to the ground; Valentine struggled to break free; neither was able to sway the other, though veins bulged on their foreheads and their faces went red and swollen with strain.

"This is madness," Valentine murmured. "Let go, back off. I mean you no harm."

Farssal only tightened his grip.

"Who sent you?" Valentine asked. "What do you want with me?"

Silence. The mighty arms, Skandar-strong, continued inexorably pressing inward. Valentine fought for breath. Pain dazed him. He tried to force his elbows outward and snap the hold. No. Farssal’s face was ugly and distorted with effort, his eyes fierce, his lips tightly set. And slowly but measurably he was pushing Valentine to the ground.

Resisting that terrible grip was impossible. Valentine abruptly ceased trying, and let himself go limp as a bundle of rags. Farssal, surprised, twisted him to one side; Valentine allowed his knees to buckle, and offered no resistance as Farssal hurled him down. But he landed lightly, on his back with his legs coiled above him, and as Farssal lunged furiously for him Valentine brought his feet up with all his force into the other man’s gut. Farssal gasped and grunted and staggered back, stunned. Valentine, springing to his feet, seized Farssal with arms made greatly muscular by months of juggling, and pushed him down roughly to the ground, and held him pinned there, knees against Farssal’s outspread arms, hands gripping his shoulders.

How strange this is, Valentine thought, to be fighting hand-to-hand with another being, as though we were unruly children! It had the quality of a dream.

Farssal glared at him in rage, slammed his feet angrily against the ground, tried in vain to push Valentine off.

"Talk to me now," Valentine said. "Tell me what this means. Did you come here to kill me?"

"I will say nothing."

"You who talked so much when we were juggling?"

"That was before."

"What am I to do with you?" Valentine asked. "If I let you up, you’ll be at me again. But if I hold you here, I hold myself as well!"

"You can’t hold me long this way."

Once more Farssal heaved. His strength was enormous. But Valentine’s grip on him was firm. Farssal’s face was scarlet; thick cords stood out on his throat; his eyes blazed with fury and frustration. For a long moment he lay still. Then he appeared to gather all his strength, going tense and thrusting upward. Valentine could not withstand that awesome push. There was a wild moment when neither man was in control of the situation, Valentine half flung aside, Farssal writhing and flexing as he tried to roll over. Valentine grabbed Farssal’s thick shoulders and attempted to force him back to the ground. Farssal shook him away and his fingers clawed for Valentine’s eyes. Valentine ducked below the clutching fingers. Then, without pausing to think about it, he seized Farssal by his coarse black beard and pulled him to one side, slamming his head into a rock that jutted from the moist soil close beside him.

Farssal made a heavy grunting sound and lay still.

Springing to his feet, Valentine seized the fallen dagger and stood above the other. He was trembling, not out of fear but from the release of tension, like a bowstring after the arrow has been let go. His ribs ached from that awful hug, and the muscles of his arms and shoulders were twitching and throbbing in fifty different rhythms.

"Farssal?" he said nudging him with one foot.

No response. Dead? No. The great barrel of a chest was slowly rising and falling, and Valentine heard the sound of hoarse, ragged breathing.

Valentine hefted the knife. What now? Sleet might say, finish the fallen man off before he came to. Impossible. One did not kill, except in self-defense. One certainly did not kill an unconscious man, would-be assassin though he might be. To kill another intelligent being meant a lifetime of punishing dreams, the vengeance of the murdered. But he could scarcely just walk away, leaving Farssal to recover and come after him. Some birdnet-vine would be a useful thing to have just now. Valentine did see another sort of vine, a sturdy-looking liana with green-and-yellow stems as thick as his fingers, scrambling far up the side of a tree; and with some fierce tugging he pulled down five huge strands of it. These he wound tightly around Farssal, who stirred and moaned but did not regain consciousness. In ten minutes Valentine had him securely trussed, bound like a mummy from chest to ankles. He tested the vines and they held tight at his pull. Valentine gathered his few possessions and hurried away. The savage encounter in the forest had shaken him badly. Not only the fighting, though that was barbaric enough, and would disturb him a long while; but also the idea that his enemy no longer was content merely to spy on him, but was sending murderers to him. And if that is so, he thought, can I doubt any longer the truth of the visions that tell me I am Lord Valentine?

Valentine barely comprehended the concept of deliberate murder. One absolutely did not take the lives of others. In the world he knew, that was basic. Not even the usurper, overthrowing him, had dared to kill him, for fear of the dark dreams that would come; but evidently now he was willing to accept that dread risk. Unless, Valentine thought, Farssal had resolved on the assassination attempt by himself, as a ghastly way of winning the favor of his employers, when he discovered Valentine slipping away toward the inner zone of the Isle.

A somber business. Valentine shuddered. More than once, as he strode along the forest trails, he looked tensely behind him, half expecting to see the black-bearded man pursuing him again.

But no pursuers came. By mid-afternoon Valentine saw the Terrace of Surrender in the distance, and the flat white face of Third Cliff far beyond it.

No one was likely to notice an unauthorized pilgrim quietly moving about among all these millions. He entered the Terrace of Surrender with what he hoped was an innocent expression, as if he had every right to be there. It was an opulent, spacious place, with a row of lofty buildings of dark blue stone at its eastern end and a grove of bassa-trees in fruit closer at hand. Valentine added half a dozen of the tender, succulent bassa-fruits to his pack and continued to the terrace baths, where he rid himself of the grime of his first day’s trek. Growing even bolder, he found the dining-hall and helped himself to soup and stewed meat. And as casually as he had come, he slipped out the far end of the terrace just as night was descending.

Again he slept in an improvised forest bed, dozing and waking often to thoughts of Farssal, and when there was light enough he rose and went onward. The stupefying white wall of Third Cliff loomed high above the forest before him.

All day he walked, and all the next, and still he seemed no closer to the cliff. Traveling on foot through these woods, he was covering, he guessed, no more than fifteen or eighteen miles a day; might it be fifty or eighty to Third Cliff? And then, how far from there to Inner Temple? This journey might take weeks. He walked on. His stride grew ever more springy; this forest life was agreeing with him.

On the fourth day Valentine reached the Terrace of Ascent. He paused briefly to refresh himself, slept in a quiet grove, and in the morning went onward until he arrived at the base of Third Cliff.

He knew nothing of the mechanism that transported the floater-sleds up the cliff walls. From here he could see the small settlement at the floater station, a few cottages, some acolytes working in a field, sleds stacked by the foot of the cliff. He considered waiting until darkness and then trying to run the sleds, but decided against it: climbing that giddy height unaided, using equipment he did not understand, seemed too risky. Forcing the acolytes to aid him was even less to his liking.

One option remained. He tidied his travel-stained robes, donned an air of supreme authority, and advanced at a dignified pace toward the floater station.

The acolytes — there were three of them — regarded him coolly.

He said, "Are the floaters ready for operation?"

"Have you business on Third Cliff?"

"I do." Valentine turned on them his most dazzling smile, letting them see, also, an underlying aspect of confidence, strength, total self-assurance. He said crisply, "I am Valentine of Alhanroel, under special summons to the Lady. They wait for me above to escort me to Inner Temple."

"Why were we not told of this?"

Valentine shrugged. "How would I know? Someone’s error, obviously. Shall I wait here until the papers arrive for you? Shall the Lady wait for me? Come, get your floaters floating!"

"Valentine of Alhanroel — special summons to the Lady—" The acolytes frowned, shook their heads, peered uncomfortably at one another. "This is all very irregular. Who did you say is to be your escort up there?"

Valentine took a deep breath. "The High Speaker Tisana of Falkynkip herself has been sent to fetch me!" he announced resonantly. "She, too, will be kept waiting while you fidget and fumble! Will you answer to her for this delay? You know what sort of temper the High Speaker has!"

"True, true," the acolytes agreed nervously, nodding to one another as though such a person actually existed and her wrath were something greatly to be dreaded.

Valentine saw that he had won. With brisk impatient gestures he mobilized them to their tasks, and in a moment he was aboard a sled and floating serenely toward the highest and most sacred of the three cliffs of the Isle of Sleep.

—10—

THE AIR ATOP THIRD CLIFF was clear and pure and cool, for this level of the Isle lay thousands of feet above sea level, and up here in the eyrie of the Lady the environment was quite different from that of the two lower steps. The trees were tall and slim, with needlelike leaves and open, symmetrical boughs, and the shrubs and plants about them had a subtropical hardiness to them, thick glossy leaves and sturdy rubbery sterns. Looking back, Valentine could not see the ocean from here, only the forested sprawl of Second Cliff and a hint of First Cliff far beyond.

A pathway of elegantly joined stone blocks led from the rim of Third Cliff toward the forest. Unhesitatingly Valentine set out upon it. He had no idea of the topography of this level, only that there were many terraces, and the last of them was the Terrace of Adoration, where one awaited the call to the Lady. He did not expect to get all the way to the threshold of Inner Temple unintercepted; but he would go as far as he could, and when they seized him as a trespasser he would give them his name and ask that it be conveyed to the Lady, and the rest would be subject to her mercy, her grace.

He was halted before he reached the outermost of Third Cliff’s terraces.

Five acolytes in the robes of the inner hierarchy, gold with red trim, emerged from the forest and arrayed themselves coolly across his path. There were three men, two women, all of considerable age, and they showed no fear of him at all.

One of the women, white-haired, with thin lips and dark, intense eyes, said, "I am Lorivade of the Terrace of Shadows and I ask you in the Lady’s name how you come to be here."

"I am Valentine of Alhanroel," he replied evenly, "and I am of the Lady’s own flesh and would have you take me to her."

The brazen statement produced no smiles among the hierarchs.

Lorivade said, "You claim kinship with the Lady?"

"I am her son."

"Her son’s name is Valentine, and he is Coronal on Castle Mount. What madness is this?"

"Bring to the Lady the news that her son Valentine has come to her across the Inner Sea and all of Zimroel, and that he is a fair-haired man, and I ask no more than that."

One of the men at Lorivade’s side said, "You wear the robes of Second Cliff. It is forbidden for you to have made this ascent."

With a sigh Valentine said, "I understand that. My ascent was unauthorized, illegal, and presumptuous. But I claim the highest reasons of state. If my message is delayed in reaching the Lady, you will answer for it."

"We are not accustomed to threats here," Lorivade declared.

"I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences."

A woman to the right of Lorivade said, "He’s a lunatic. We’ll have to confine him and treat him."

"And censure the crew below," said another man. "And discover which terrace he’s from, and how he was allowed to wander away from it," said a third.

"I ask only that you send my message to the Lady," Valentine said quietly.

They surrounded him and, moving in formation, walked him briskly along the forest path to a place where three floaters were parked and a number of younger acolytes waited. Evidently they had been prepared for serious trouble. Lorivade gestured to one of the acolytes and issued brief orders; then the five hierarchs boarded one of the floaters and were borne away.

Acolytes moved toward Valentine. None too gently they caught him and propelled him toward a floater. He smiled and indicated he would make no resistance, but they held him firmly and pushed him roughly into a seat. The floater rose to full hover and, at a signal, the mounts tethered to it began to trot toward the nearby terrace.

It was a place of wide, low buildings and great stone plazas, this Terrace of Shadows, and the shadows that gave it its name were black as the darkest ink, mysterious all-engulfing pools of night that stretched in strangely significant patterns over the abstract stone statuary. But Valentine’s tour of the terrace was brief. His captors halted outside a squat stark building without windows; a cunningly fashioned door slid open on silent hinges at the lightest of touches; he was ushered inside.

The door closed and left no trace in the wall. He was a prisoner.

The room was square, low-ceilinged, and bleak. A single dim glow-float cast a mellow greenish light. There was a cleanser, a sink, a commode, a mattress. Beyond that, nothing.

Would they send his message to the Lady? Or would they leave him here to grow dusty, while they investigated the irregularities of his advent on Third Cliff, rummaging for weeks in the island bureaucracy?

An hour passed, two, three. Let them send an interrogator, he prayed, an inquisitor, anyone, only not this silence, this boredom, this solitude. He counted paces. The room was not precisely square: one pair of walls was a pace and a half longer than the other pair. He searched for the outlines of the doorway, and could not find them. The fit was seamless, a marvel of design that gave him little cheer. He invented dialogues and silently embellished them: Valentine and Deliamber, Valentine and the Lady, Valentine and Carabella, Valentine and Lord Valentine. But it was an amusement that soon palled.

He heard a faint whining sound and whirled to see a slot open in the wall and a tray come sliding into his cell. They had given him baked fish, a cluster of ivory-colored grapes, a beaker of cool red juice. "For this repast I thank you kindly," he said out loud. His fingers probed the wall, seeking the place where the tray had entered: no trace.

He ate. He invented more dialogues, conversing in his mind with Sleet, with the old dream-speaker Tisana, with Zalzan Kavol, with Captain Gorzval. He asked them about their childhoods, their hopes and dreams, their political opinions, their tastes in food and drink and clothing. Again the game wore thin after a while, and he stretched out to sleep.

Sleep was thin too, a shallow doze, broken half a dozen times by white dreary spells of wakefulness. His dreams were patchy ones; through them drifted the Lady, Farssal, the King of Dreams, the Metamorph chieftain, and the hierarch Lorivade, but they offered only muddled and murky words. When he woke, finally, a tray of breakfast had appeared in the room.

A long day passed.

He had never known a day so interminable. There was nothing at all to do, nothing, nothing whatever, an endless stretch of gray nothingness. He would have juggled his dishes, but they were light and flimsy things and it would have been like juggling feathers. He tried to juggle his boots, but he had only two of those and juggling things in twos was a fool’s sport. He juggled memories instead, reliving all that had befallen him since Pidruid, but the prospect of an infinity of hours doing that dismayed him. He meditated until there was a dull buzz of fatigue between his ears. He crouched in the center of the room, trying to anticipate the moment when the next meal would arrive, but the tension he generated out of that yielded only feeble entertainment.

On the second night Valentine made an attempt to communicate with the Lady. He prepared himself for sleep, but as his mind began to release itself from consciousness he endeavored to slip into an intermediate place between waking and sleeping, a trance-state of sorts. It was a ticklish business, for if he concentrated too intently he would tip himself back into full wakefulness, and if he relaxed too thoroughly he would fall asleep; he balanced there a long time, at the floating-point, wishing he had taken the opportunity in some quiet part of his Zimroel journey to have Deliamber train him in these matters.

At last he sent forth his spirit.

— Mother?

He imagined his soul coursing high over the Terrace of Shadows and drifting inward, inward, past terrace after terrace, to the core of Third Cliff, to Inner Temple, to the chamber where the Lady of the Isle rested.

— Mother, it’s Valentine. It’s your son Valentine. I have so much to tell you, mother, and so much to ask! But you have to help me reach you.

Valentine lay still. He was wholly calm. A pure white radiance seemed to glow in his mind.

—Mother, I’m on Third Cliff, in a prison cell in the Terrace of Shadows. I’ve come so far, mother. But now I’m stopped. Send for me, mother!

—Mother—

—Lady—

—Mother—

He slept.

The radiance still glowed. He perceived the first tingling music of the dream-state, the overture, the initial sensations of contact. Visions came. No longer was he imprisoned. He lay beneath the cool white stars on a great circular platform of finely polished stone, as though an altar, and to him came a white-robed woman with lustrous dark hair, who knelt beside him and touched him lightly, saying in a tender voice, "You are my son Valentine, and I do acknowledge you before all Majipoor to be my son, and I summon you now to my side."

That was all. When he woke he could recall nothing of the dream but that.

There was no breakfast tray for him that morning. Was it truly morning, then, or had he awakened in the middle of the night? Hours passed. No tray. Had they forgotten him? Did they plan to starve him to death? He felt a twinge of terror: was that an improvement over boredom? He thought he preferred boredom to terror, but not by much. He called out, but he knew it was useless. This place was sealed like a tomb. Like a tomb. Glumly Valentine looked at the accumulation of old trays, stacked against the far wall. He remembered the wonders and joys of food, the sausages of the Liiimen, the fish that Khun and Sleet had grilled on the banks of the Steiche, the flavor of dwikka-fruit, the potent tang of fireshower wine in Pidruid. His hunger was growing intense. And he was frightened. Not bored at all now, but frightened. They had held a meeting, perhaps, and condemned him to death for overwhelming folly.

Minutes. Hours. Half a day gone now.

Folly to think he could touch the Lady’s mind in sleep. Folly to think he could float effortlessly into Inner Temple and win her aid. Folly to think he could regain Castle Mount, or that he had ever had it at all. He had propelled himself halfway around the world on no force other than folly, and now, he thought bitterly, he would have the reward of his presumption and his foolishness.

Then at last he heard the familiar faint whine. But it was not the food-slot opening: it was the door.

Two white-haired hierarchs entered the cell. They favored him with a look of bleak and sour bafflement.

"Have you come to deliver my breakfast?" Valentine asked.

"We have come," said the taller one, "to conduct you to Inner Temple."

—11—

H` feed him first — a wise move, for the trip proved to be a lengthy one, all the rest of the day by swift mount-drawn floater-wagon. The hierarchs sat flanking him in chilly silence throughout. When he asked a question — the name of some terrace through which they were passing, for example — they would reply in the fewest possible words; otherwise they offered no chatter.

Third Cliff had many terraces — Valentine lost count after about seven — and they were much closer together than those of the outer cliffs, with only token strips of forest separating them. This central zone of the Isle seemed a busy and populous place.

At twilight they came to the Terrace of Adoration, a domain of serene gardens and rambling low buildings of whitewashed stone. Like all the other terraces it was circular in outline, but it was much smaller than the others, here at the innermost part of the island, a mere ringlet that probably could be walked in all its circumference in an hour or two, whereas it might take months to complete the circuit of a First Cliff terrace. Ancient gnarled trees with close-set oval leaves rose at regular intervals along its rampart. Bowers of richly blossoming vines coiled between the buildings; small courtyards were everywhere, decorated with slender pillars of polished black stone and bedecked with flowering shrubs. In twos and threes the servants of the Lady moved quietly through these peaceful precincts. Valentine was conducted to a chamber far more gracious than his last, with a broad sunken bath, an inviting bed, windows facing into a garden, baskets of fruit on the table. The hierarchs left him here. He bathed, nibbled fruit, waited for the next event. That was some time in arriving, an hour or more: a knock on the door, a soft voice asking if he wished dinner, a cart rolled into the room bearing more substantial fare than he had had since coming to the Isle — grilled meats, blue gourds artfully stuffed with minced fish, a beaker of something cold that might almost have been wine. Valentine ate eagerly. Afterward he stood by his windows a long time, studying the darkness. He saw nothing; he heard no one. He tested his door: locked. So he was still a prisoner, although in far more pleasing surroundings than before.

He slept a dreamless sleep. A flood of golden sunlight cascading into his room awakened him. He bathed; the same discreet servitor appeared outside, with a breakfast of sausages and stewed pink fruit; and a short while after he was done the two somber hierarchs came to him, saying, "The Lady has summoned you this morning."

They led him through a garden of marvelous beauty and across a slender bridge of pure white stone that rose in a gentle arch above a dark pond in which golden fish swam in sparkling patterns. Ahead lay a wondrously manicured green-sward. At the center of it was a one-story building of great size, extraordinarily delicate in form, with long narrow wings radiating in the form of starbeams from the circular center.

This could only be Inner Temple, Valentine thought.

Now he trembled. He had journeyed, for more months than he could remember, toward this very spot, toward the threshold of the mysterious woman whose realm this was, whom he fancied to be his mother. At last he was here; and what if it proved all to be foolishness, or fantasy, or terrible error, what if he was no one in particular, a yellow-haired idler from Zimroel, bereft of his memory through some stupidity and filled by trifling companions with nonsensical ambitions? The thought was unbearable. If the Lady repudiated him now, if she denied him—

He entered the temple.

The hierarchs still close at his sides, Valentine marched endlessly down an impossibly elongated entrance hall that was guarded every twenty feet by a grim-faced rigid warrior, and into an interior room, octagonal in shape, with walls of the finest white stone and a pool, octagonal also, at its center. Morning light entered through an open eight-sided skylight. At each corner of the room stood a stern figure in hierarchical robes. Valentine, a little dazed, looked from one to the next and saw no welcome on their faces, only a sort of pursed-lip disapproval.

There was a single note of music, softly swelling, then dying away, and when it was gone the Lady of the Isle was in the room.

She seemed much like the figure Valentine had seen so often in dreams: a woman of middle years and ordinary height, dusky of skin, with glossy black hair, warm soft eyes, a full mouth that hovered always at the edge of a smile, a silver band at her brow, and, yes, a flower behind one ear, with many thick green petals. It seemed, though, that there was an aura about her, a nimbus, a radiance of force and authority and majesty, such as befitted the Power of Majipoor that she was, and he had not been prepared for that, expecting as he had been only the warm motherly woman, and forgetting that she was a queen, a priestess, almost a goddess, as well. He stood speechless before her, and for a long moment she studied him from the far side of the pool, her gaze resting lightly but penetratingly on his face. Then she waved one hand sharply in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Not of him: of the hierarchs. Their glacial calm was broken by that. They looked to one another, obviously confused. The Lady repeated the gesture, a mere shallow snap of the wrist, and something imperious flashed in her eyes, a look of almost terrifying strength. Three or four of the hierarchs left the room; the others dawdled, as if not believing that the Lady proposed to be left alone with the prisoner. For an instant it seemed that a third wave of her hand might be necessary, as one of the oldest and most imposing of the hierarchs extended a quivering arm toward her in a motion of obvious protest. But at a glance from the Lady the Hierarch’s arm dropped back to his side. Slowly the last of them went out of the room.

Valentine fought the impulse to fall to his knees. He said in a barely audible voice, "I have no idea of the proper obeisance to make. Nor do I know, Lady, how I should address you, without giving offense."

Calmly she replied, "It will be enough, Valentine, if you call me mother."

The quiet words stunned him. He took a faltering few steps toward her, halted, stared.

"Is it so?" he asked in a whisper.

"There can be no doubt of it."

He felt his cheeks ablaze. He stood helpless, numbed by her grace. She beckoned to him, the tiniest movement of her fingertips, and he shook as though he were caught in an ocean gale.

"Come close," she said. "Are you afraid? Come to me, Valentine!"

He crossed the room, went round the pool, drew near her. She put her hands into his. Instantly he felt a jolt of energy, a tangible, palpable throbbing, somewhat akin to what he had felt when Deliamber touched him to do wizardry-work, but enormously more powerful, enormously more awesome. He would have withdrawn his hands at that first throb of force, but she held him, and he could not, and her eyes close by his seemed to be seeing through him, entering all his mysteries.

"Yes," she said finally. "By the Divine, yes, Valentine, your body is strange but your soul is of my own making! Oh, Valentine, Valentine, what have they done to you? What have they done to Majipoor?" She tugged at his hands, and pulled him close to her, and then he was in her arms, the Lady straining upward to embrace him, and he felt her trembling now, no goddess but only a woman, a mother holding her troubled son. In her grasp he felt such peace as he had not known since his awakening in Pidruid, and he clung to her, praying she would never release him.

Then she stood back and surveyed him, smiling. "You were given a handsome body, at least. Nothing like what you once were, but pleasing to the eye, and strong as well, and healthy. They could have done much worse. They could have made you something weak and sickly and deformed, but I suppose they lacked the courage, knowing that eventually they would be repaid tenfold for all their crimes."

"Who, mother?"

She seemed surprised at his question. "Why, Barjazid and his brood!"

Valentine said, "I know nothing, mother, except what has come to me in dreams, and even that has been befogged and muddled."

"And what is it that you know?"

"That my body has been taken from me, that in some witchery of the King of Dreams I was left outside Pidruid as you see me, that someone else, I think it may be Dominin Barjazid, rules now from Castle Mount. But I know all this only in the most untrustworthy of ways."

"It is all true," the Lady replied.

"When was it that this happened?"

"In early summer," she said. "When you made the grand processional in Zimroel. I have no knowledge of how it was done; but one night as I lay sleeping I felt a wrenching, a tearing, as of the heart of the planet being ripped loose, and I awakened knowing that something evil and monstrous had occurred, and I sent out my soul toward you and was unable to reach you. There was only a silence where you had been, a void. Yet it was different from the silence that struck me when Voriax was slain, for I still felt your presence, but beyond my reach, as if behind a thick sheet of glass. I asked at once for news of the Coronal. He is in Til-omon, my people told me. And is he well? I asked. Yes, they said, he is well, he sails today toward Pidruid. But I could make no contact, Valentine. I sent forth my soul as I had not done in years, to every part of the world, and you were nowhere and somewhere, both at once. I was frightened and confused, Valentine, but I could do nothing but seek and wait, and news came to me that Lord Valentine had reached Pidruid, that he was guest in the mayor’s grand house, and I had a vision of him across all this distance and his face was the face of my son. But his mind was other, and it was closed to me. I attempted a sending, and I could not send to him. And at last I began to understand."

"Did you know where I was?"

"Not at first. They had witched your mind so well it was altogether changed. Night after night I cast my soul forth into Zimroel in search of you — neglecting everything else here, but this was no trifling matter, this substitution of Coronals — and I thought I felt glimmers, a shard of your true self, a fragment — and after a time I was able to determine that you were alive, that you were in northwestern Zimroel, but there was still no reaching you. I had to wait until you had awakened more to yourself, until their witcheries had faded a bit and your true mind was restored at least in part."

"It is still far from whole, mother."

"I know that. But that can be remedied, I believe."

"When did you finally reach me?"

She paused a moment in thought. "It was near the Ghayrog city, I think, Dulorn, and I saw you first through the minds of others who were dreaming the truth about you. And I touched their minds, I refined and clarified what was in them, and I saw that your soul had imprinted its stamp on them and that they knew better than you did yourself what had befallen you. I circled about you in this way, and then I was able to enter you. And from that moment on you have gained in knowledge of your former self, as I have labored across so many thousands of miles to heal you and to draw you to me. But none of it was easy. The world of dreams. Valentine, is a difficult and shifting place, even for me, and to attempt to control it is like writing a book in the sand beside an ocean: the tide returns and obliterates nearly everything, and you must write it again, and again and again. But at last you are here."

"Did you know it when I reached the Isle?"

"I knew it, yes. I could feel your closeness."

"And yet you let me drift for months from terrace to terrace!"

She laughed. "There are millions of pilgrims in the outer terraces. Sensing you was one thing, actually locating you another, far more difficult. Besides, you were not ready to come to me, nor I to receive you. I was testing you. Valentine. Watching you from afar, studying to see how much of your soul had survived, whether there still was any of the Coronal remaining in you. Before I acknowledged you I had to know these things."

"And does much of Lord Valentine remain in me, then?"

"A great deal. Far more than your enemies could ever suspect. Their scheme was faulty: they thought they had expunged you, when they only fuddled and disordered you."

"Would it not have been wiser for them to have killed me outright, than to have put my soul in some other body?"

"Wiser, yes," the Lady replied. "But they did not dare. Yours is an anointed spirit, Valentine. These Barjazids are superstitious beasts; they will risk overthrowing a Coronal, it seems, but not destroying him altogether, for fear of your spirit’s vengeance. And their cowardly hesitation now will bring about the ruin of their scheme."

Valentine said softly, "Do you think I can ever regain my place?"

"Do you doubt it?"

"Barjazid wears the face of Lord Valentine. The people accept him as Coronal. He controls the power of Castle Mount. I have perhaps a dozen followers and am unknown. If I proclaim myself rightful Coronal, who will believe me? And how long then before Dominin Barjazid deals with me the way he should have dealt with me in Til-omon?"

"You have the support of the Lady your mother."

"And have you an army, mother?"

The Lady smiled gently. "I have no army, no. But I am a Power of Majipoor, which is not a small thing. I have the strength of righteousness and love, Valentine. I also have this."

She touched the silver circlet at her brow.

"Through which you make your sendings?" Valentine asked.

"Yes. Through which I can reach the minds of all Majipoor. I lack the ability of the Barjazids to control and direct, which their devices are capable of doing. But I can communicate, I can guide, I can influence. You will have one of these circlets before you leave the Isle."

"And I’ll go quietly through Alhanroel, beaming messages of love to the citizens, until Dominin Barjazid descends from the Mount and gives me back the throne?"

The Lady’s eyes flashed with the kind of anger Valentine had seen in them when she was sending the hierarchs from the room.

"What sort of talk is that?" she snapped.

"Mother—"

"Oh, they have changed you! The Valentine I bore and reared accepted no thought of defeat."

"Nor do I, mother. But it all seems so immense, and I’m so weary. And to make war against citizens of Majipoor — even against a usurper — Mother, there’s been no war on Majipoor since earliest times. Am I the one to break the peace?"

Her eyes were merciless. "The peace is already broken, Valentine. It falls to you to restore the order of the realm. A false Coronal has reigned nearly a year now. Cruel and foolish laws are proclaimed daily. The innocent are punished, the guilty flourish. Balances constructed thousands of years ago are being destroyed. When our people came here from Old Earth, fourteen thousand years past, many mistakes were made, much suffering was endured, before we found our way of government, but since the time of the first Pontifex we have lived without major upheaval, and since the time of Lord Stiamot there has been peace on this world. Now there has been a rupture of that peace, and it falls to you to put things to rights."

"And if I accept what Dominin Barjazid has done? If I decline to embroil Majipoor in civil war? Would the consequences be so evil?"

"You know the answers to those questions already."

"I would hear them from you, because my resolve wavers."

"It shames me to hear you speak those words."

"Mother, I have undergone strange things on this journey and they have taken much of my strength. Am I not allowed a moment of fatigue?"

"You are a king, Valentine."

"I was, perhaps, and perhaps will be again. But much of my kingliness was stolen from me in Til-omon. I am an ordinary man now. And not even kings are immune to weariness and discouragement, mother."

In a tone more gentle than the one she had been using, the Lady said, "The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power — while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster."

Valentine nodded. "When I am not so weary, I see that, yes."

"Think, too, of what will happen when the Pontifex Tyeveras dies, which must sooner or later happen, and more probably sooner than later."

"Barjazid goes to the Labyrinth then, and becomes a powerless recluse. Is that what you mean?"

"The Pontifex is not powerless, and he does not need to be a recluse. In your lifetime there has been only Tyeveras, growing older and older and steadily more strange. But a Pontifex in full vigor is a very different entity. What if Barjazid is Pontifex five years from now? Do you think he’ll be content to sit in that underground hole the way Tyeveras now does? He’ll rule with force, Valentine." She looked at him intently. "And who do you think will become Coronal?" Valentine shook his head.

She said, "The King of Dreams has three sons. Minax is the oldest, who will have the throne in Suvrael one of these days. Dominin is now Coronal and will be Pontifex, if you choose to let him. Whom will he select as new Coronal but his younger brother, Cristoph?"

"But it goes against all nature for a Pontifex to give Castle Mount to his own brother!"

"It goes against all nature for a son of the King of Dreams to overthrow a rightful Coronal, too," said the Lady. Once more her eyes flashed. "Consider this, also: when there is a change in Coronals, there is a change in the Lady of the Isle! I go to live out my days in the palace for retired Ladies in the Terrace of Shadows, and who comes to Inner Temple? The mother of the Barjazids! Do you see, Valentine, they will have everything, they will control all of Majipoor!"

"This must not be," Valentine said.

"This will not be."

"What shall I do?"

"You will take ship from my port of Numinor to Alhanroel, with all your people and others I will provide for you. You will land in the Stoienzar, and journey to the Labyrinth for the blessing of Tyeveras."

"But if Tyeveras is a madman—"

"Not entirely mad. He lives in a perpetual dream, and a strange one, but I have touched his spirit lately, and the old Tyeveras still exists somewhere within. He has been Pontifex forty years, Valentine, and was Coronal a long while before that, and he knows the way our realm was meant to be governed. If you can reach him, if you can demonstrate to him that you are the true Lord Valentine, he will give you aid. Then you must march on Castle Mount. Do you shrink from that task?"

"I shrink only from bringing chaos upon Majipoor."

"The chaos is already at hand. What you bring is order and justice." She moved close to him, so that all the frightening power of her personality was exposed to him, and touched his hand, and said in a low, vehement tone, "I bore two sons, and from the moment one looked at them in their cradles, one knew they were meant to be kings. The first was Voriax — do you remember him? I suppose not, not yet — and he was magnificent, a splendid man, a hero, a demigod, and even in his childhood they said of him on Castle Mount, This is the one, this will be Coronal when Lord Malibor becomes Pontifex. Voriax was a marvel, but there was a second son, Valentine, as strong and as splendid as Voriax, not so much given to sport and exploits as he, but a warmer soul, and a wiser one, one who understood without being told what was right and what was wrong, one who had no cruelty in his spirit whatever, one who was of even and balanced and sunny temperament, so that everyone loved him and respected him, and it was said of Valentine that he would be an even finer king than Voriax, but of course Voriax was older and would be chosen, with Valentine fated to be nothing more than a high minister. And Malibor did not become Pontifex, but died before his time hunting dragons, and emissaries of Tyeveras came to Voriax and said, You are Coronal of Majipoor, and the first to fall before him and make the starburst was his brother Valentine. And so Lord Voriax ruled on Castle Mount, and ruled well, and I came to the Isle of Sleep as I had always known I would, and for eight years all was well on Majipoor. And then what happened was something no one could have foretold, that Lord Voriax would perish before his time as Lord Malibor had, hunting in the forest and struck down by a stray bolt. Yet there still was Valentine, and though it was rare for the brother of a Coronal to become Coronal after him, there was little debate, for everyone recognized his high qualifications. Thus Lord Valentine came to and I who was mother to two kings remained at Inner Temple, satisfied with the sons I had given to Majipoor and confident that the reign of Lord Valentine would be one of Majipoor’s glories. Do you think I can allow Barjazids to sit for long where my sons once sat? Do you think I can endure the sight of Lord Valentine’s face masking the Barjazid’s shabby soul? Oh, Valentine, Valentine, you are only half what you once were, less than half, but you will be yourself again, and Castle Mount will be yours and the destinies of Majipoor will not be altered to something evil, and talk no more of shrinking from bringing chaos into the world. The chaos is upon us. You are the deliverer. Do you understand?"

"I understand, mother."

"Then come with me, and I will make you whole."

—12—

SHE LED HIM FROM THE octagonal chamber, down one of the spokes of Inner Temple, past rigid guards and a group of frowning, bewildered hierarchs, into a small bright room bedecked with brilliant flowers of a dozen colors. Here was a desk fashioned of a single slab of gleaming darbelion, and a low couch, and a few small pieces of furniture; this was the Lady’s study, it seemed. She beckoned Valentine to a seat and took from the desk two small ornate flasks. "Drink this wine in a single draught," she told him, handing him one flask.

"Wine, mother? On the Isle?"

"You and I are not pilgrims here. Drink it."

He uncorked the flask and put it to his lips. The flavor was familiar to him, dark and spicy and sweet, but it was a moment before he could identify it: the wine dream-speakers used, that contained the drug that made minds open to minds. The Lady downed the contents of the second flask.

Valentine said, "Are we then to do a speaking?"

"No. This must be done while awake. I have thought long about how to manage this." From her desk she withdrew a shimmering silver circlet, identical to her own, and gave it to him. "Let it rest on your brow," she said. "From this time until you ascend Castle Mount, wear it constantly, for it will be the center of your power."

Cautiously he slipped the circlet over his head. It fit snugly at his temples, a strange close sensation, not entirely to his liking, although the metal band was so fine he was surprised to notice it at all. The Lady drew near him and smoothed his thick long hair over it.

"Golden hair," she said lightly. "I never thought to have a son with golden hair! What do you feel, with the circlet on you?"

"The tightness of it."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing else, mother."

"The tightness will soon cease to matter, as you get used to it. Do you feel the drug yet?"

"A slight cloudiness in my mind, only. I think I could sleep, if I were allowed."

"Sleep will soon be the last thing you crave," said the Lady. She extended both her hands to him. "Are you a good juggler, my son?" she asked unexpectedly.

He grinned. "So they tell me."

"Good. Tomorrow you must show me some of your skills. I would find that amusing. But now give me your hands. Both. Here."

She held her fine-boned strong-looking hands over his for an instant. Then she interlaced her fingers with his in a quick, decisive gesture.

It was as though a switch had been thrown, a circuit had been closed. Valentine staggered with shock. He stumbled, almost fell, and felt the Lady grasping him tightly, steadying him as he lurched about the room. There was a sensation in his mind as of a spike being driven through the base of his skull. The universe reeled about him; he was unable to control his eyes or to focus them, and he saw only fragmentary blurred images: the face of his mother, the shining surface of the desk, the blazing hues of the flowers, everything pulsing and throbbing and whirling.

His heart pounded. His throat was dry. His lungs felt empty. This was more terrifying than being drawn into the vortex of the sea-dragon and disappearing into the deep waters. Now his legs betrayed him entirely, and, unable any longer to stand, he sagged to the floor, kneeling there, somehow aware of the Lady kneeling before him, her face close to him, her fingers still locked between his, the terrible searing contact of their souls unbroken. Memories flooded him.

He saw the vast gigantic splendor that was Castle Mount and the sprawling unthinkable enormity of the Coronal’s Castle at its impossible summit. His mind roved with lightning speed through rooms of state with gilded walls and soaring arched ceilings, through banquet halls and council-chambers, through corridors wide as plazas. Brilliant lights flashed and sparkled and dazed him. He sensed a male presence beside him, tall, powerful, confident, strong, holding one of his hands, and a woman equally strong and self-assured holding the other, and knew them to be his father and mother, and saw a boy just ahead who was his brother Voriax.

— What is this room, father?

— The Confalume throne-room, it is called.

— And that man with the long red hair? Sitting on the big chair?

— He is the Coronal Lord Malibor.

— What does that mean?

— Silly Valentine! He doesn’t know what the Coronal is!

— Quiet, Voriax. The Coronal is the king, Valentine, one of the two kings, the younger one. The other is the Pontifex, who once was Coronal himself.

— Which one is he?

— The tall thin one, with the very dark beard.

— His name is Pontifex?

— His name is Tyeveras. Pontifex is what he is called as our king. He lives near the Stoienzar, but he is here today because Lord Malibor the Coronal is going to be married.

— And will Lord Malibor’s children be Coronals too, mother?

— No, Valentine.

— Who will be Coronal next?

— No one knows that yet, son.

— Will I? Will Voriax?

— It could happen, if you grow up wise and strong.

— Oh, I will, father, I will, I will!

The room dissolved. Valentine saw himself in another room, similarly magnificent but not quite as large, and he was older now, not a boy but a young man, and there was Voriax with the starburst crown on his head, looking somewhat befuddled by it.

— Voriax! Lord Voriax!

Valentine dropped to his knees and raised his hands, spreading his fingers wide. And Voriax smiled and gestured at him.

— Get up, brother, get up. It is not fitting that you crawl like this in front of me.

— You will be the most splendid Coronal in the history of Majipoor, Lord Voriax.

— Call me brother, Valentine. I am Coronal, but I am still your brother.

— Long life to you, brother! Long life to the Coronal! And others were shouting it about him:

— Long life to the Coronal! Long life to the Coronal!

But something had changed, though the room was the same, for Lord Voriax was nowhere in view, and it was Valentine who wore the strange crown now, and the others who were shouting to him, and kneeling before him, and waving their fingers in the air, crying his name. He looked at them in wonder.

— Long life to Lord Valentine!

— I thank you, my friends. I will try to be worthy of my brother’s memory.

— Long life to Lord Valentine!

"Long life to Lord Valentine," said the Lady softly.

Valentine blinked and gaped. For a moment he was entirely disoriented, wondering why he was kneeling like this, and what room he was in, and who this woman was with her face so close to his. Then the shadows cleared from his mind.

He rose to his feet.

He felt altogether transformed. Through his mind coursed turbulent memories: the years on Castle Mount, the studies, all that dry history, the roster of the Coronals, the list of the Pontifexes, the volumes of constitutional lore, the economic surveys of the provinces of Majipoor, the long sessions with his tutors, with his constantly probing father, with his mother — and the other, less dedicated moments: the games, the river-journeys, the tournaments, his friends, Elidath and Stasilaine and Tunigorn, the free-flowing wine, the hunts, the good times with Voriax, the two of them the center of all eyes, the princes of princes. And the terrible moment of the death of Lord Malibor at sea, and Voriax’ look of fright and joy at being named Coronal, and then the time eight years later when the delegation of high princes came to Valentine to offer him his brother’s crown—

He remembered.

He remembered everything, up to a night in Til-omon, when all recollection ceased. And after that he knew only the sunshine of Pidruid, pebbles tumbling past him from a ridge, the boy Shanamir standing above him with his mounts. He looked at himself in his mind and it seemed to him that he cast a double shadow, one bright and one dark; and he looked through the insubstantial haze of false memories that they had given him in Til-omon, looked back over an impenetrable gap of darkness to the time when he was Coronal. He knew that his mind now was as whole as it was ever likely to be.

Again the Lady said, "Long life to Lord Valentine."

"Yes," he said in wonder. "Yes, I am Lord Valentine, and will be again. Mother, give me ships. The Barjazid has already had too much time on the throne."

"Ships are waiting in Numinor, and people loyal to me who will enter your service."

"Good. There are people here who must be gathered, I don’t know from which terraces, but they’ll have to be found swiftly. A little Vroon, some Skandars, a Hjort, a blue-skinned stranger from another world, and several humans. I’ll give you the names."

"We will find them," said the Lady.

Valentine said, "And I thank you, mother, for returning me to myself."

"Thanks? Why thanks? I gave you to yourself originally. No thanks were required for that. Now you are brought forth again, Valentine, and if needs be I’ll do it a third time. But let needs not be. Your fortunes now resume their upward path." Her eyes were bright with merriment. "Will I see you juggle this evening, Valentine? How many balls can you keep in the air at once?"

"Twelve," he said.

"And blaves can dance. Speak the truth!"

"Less than twelve," he admitted. "But more than two. I’ll stage a performance after we dine. And — mother?"

"Yes?"

"When I regain Castle Mount I’ll hold a grand festival, and you’ll come from the Isle, and you’ll see me juggle again, from the steps of the Confalume Throne. I promise you that, mother. From the steps of the throne."