Lord Valentine's Castle

—1—

THE ASCENT FROM THE DEPTHS of the Labyrinth was far more swiftly accomplished than the descent had been; for on the interminable downward spiral Valentine had been an unknown adventurer, clawing his way past a stolidly uncaring bureaucracy, and on the upward journey he was a Power of the realm.

Not for him, now, the tortuous climb through level after level, ring after ring, back up through all the intricacies of the Pontifical lair, House of Records and Arena and Place of Masks and Hall of Winds and all the rest. Now he and his followers rose, quickly and without hindrance, using the passage reserved for Powers alone.

In just a few hours he attained the outer ring, that brightly lit and populous halfway house on the rim of the underground city. For all the speed of his climb, the news of his identity had traveled even faster. Word somehow had spread through the Labyrinth that the Coronal was here, a Coronal mysteriously transformed but Coronal nonetheless, and as he emerged from the imperial passageway a great crowd stood assembled, staring as if some creature with nine heads and thirty legs had come forth.

It was a silent crowd. Some made the sign of the starburst, a few called out his name. But most were content simply to gape. The Labyrinth was the domain of the Pontifex, after all, and Valentine knew that the adulation a Coronal would receive elsewhere in Majipoor was not likely here. Awe, yes. Respect, yes. Curiosity, above all. But none of the cheering and waving that Valentine had seen bestowed on the counterfeit Lord Valentine when he rode in grand processional through the streets of Pidruid. Just as well, thought Valentine. He was out of practice at being the object of adulation, and he had never cared much for it, anyway. It was enough — more than enough — that they accepted him, now, as the personage he claimed to be.

"Will it all be that easy?" he asked Deliamber. "Simply ride across Alhanroel proclaiming myself the real Lord Valentine, and have everything fall into my hands?"

"I doubt it mightily. Barjazid still wears the Coronal’s countenance. He still holds the seals of power. Down here, if the ministers of the Pontifex say you are the Coronal, the citizens will hail you as Coronal. If they had said you were Lady of the Isle, they probably would hail you as Lady of the Isle. I think it will be different outside."

"I want no bloodshed, Deliamber."

"No one does. But blood will flow before you mount the Confalume Throne once more. There’s no avoiding it. Valentine."

Gloomily Valentine said, "I would almost rather abandon power to the Barjazid than plunge this land into some convulsion of violence. Peace is what I love, Deliamber."

"And peace is what there will be," said the little wizard. "But the road to peace is not always peaceful. See, there — your army is gathering already, Valentine!"

Valentine saw, not far ahead, a knot of people, some familiar, some unknown to him. All those who had gone into the Labyrinth with him were there, the band he had accumulated in his journey across the world, Skandars, Lisamon Hultin, Vinorkis, Khun, Shanamir, Lorivade and the bodyguard of the Lady, and the rest. But also there were several hundred in the colors of the Pontifex, already assembled, the first detachment of — what? Not troops; the Pontifex had no troops. A civilian militia, then? Lord Valentine’s army, at any rate.

"My army," Valentine said. The word had a bitter taste. "Armies are something out of Lord Stiamot’s time, Deliamber. How many thousands of years has it been since there has been war on Majipoor?"

"Things have been quiet a long while," the Vroon said. "But nevertheless there are small armies in existence. The bodyguards of the Lady, the servitors of the Pontifex — and what about the knights of the Coronal, eh? What do you call them, if not an army? Carrying weapons, drilling on the fields of Castle Mount — what are they, Valentine? Lords and ladies amusing themselves in games?"

"So I thought, Deliamber, when I was one of them."

"Time to think otherwise, my lord. The knights of the Coronal form the nucleus of a military force, and only an innocent would believe anything else. As you will discover quite inescapably, Valentine, when you come closer to Castle Mount."

"Can Dominin Barjazid bring my own knights out in battle against me?" Valentine asked in horror.

The Vroon gave him a long cool stare. "The man you call Dominin Barjazid is, at the moment, Lord Valentine the Coronal, to whom the knights of Castle Mount are bound by oath. Or have you forgotten that? With luck and craft you may be able to convince them that their oath is to the soul and spirit of Lord Valentine, and not to his face and beard. But some will remain loyal to the man they think is you, and they will lift swords against you in his name."

The thought was sickening. Since the restoration of his memory Valentine had thought more than once of the companions of his earlier life, those noble men and women with whom he had grown up, with whom he had learned the princely arts in happier days, whose love and friendship had been central to his life until the day the usurper had shattered that life. That bold huntsman Elidath of Morvole, and the fair-haired and agile Stasilaine, and Tunigorn, who was so quick with the bow, and so many more — only names to him now, shadowy figures out of a distant past, and yet in a moment those shadows could be given life and color and vigor. Would they now come forth against him in war? His friends, his beloved companions of long ago — if he had to do battle with them for Majipoor’s sake, so be it, but the prospect was dismaying.

He shook his head. "Perhaps we can avoid that. Come," he said. "The time for leaving this place is at hand."

Near the gateway known as the Mouth of Waters Valentine held a jubilant reunion with his followers and met the officers that had been provided for him by the ministers of the Pontifex. They seemed a capable crew, perceptibly quickened in spirit by this chance to leave the dreary depths of the Labyrinth. Their leader was a short, tight-coiled man named Ermanar, with close-cropped reddish hair and a short sharp-pointed beard, who in his size and movements and straight-forwardness might well have been brother to Sleet. Valentine liked him at once. Ermanar made the starburst at Valentine in a quick, perfunctory way, smiled warmly, and said, "I will be at your side, my lord, until the Castle is yours again."

"May the journey north be an easy one," Valentine said.

"Have you chosen a route?"

"By riverboat up the Glayge would be swiftest, would it not?"

Ermanar nodded. "At any other time of year, yes. But the autumn rains have come, and they have been unusually heavy." He drew forth a small map of central Alhanroel, showing the districts from the Labyrinth to Castle Mount in glowing red on some bit of dark fabric. "See, my lord, the Glayge descending from the Mount, and pouring into Lake Roghoiz, and its remnant emerging here to continue on to the Mouth of Waters before us? Just now the river is swollen and dangerous from Pendiwane to the lake — that is, for hundreds of miles. I propose a land route at least as far as Pendiwane. There we can arrange shipping for ourselves nearly to the source of the Glayge."

"It sounds wise. Do you know the roads?"

"Fairly well, my lord." He poked his finger at the map. "Much depends on whether the plain of the Glayge is flooded as badly as reports have it. I would prefer to move through the Glayge Valley, in this fashion, simply skirting the northern side of Lake Roghoiz, never getting too far from the river as we proceed."

"And if the valley’s flooded?"

"Then there are roads farther north we can use. But the land there is dry, unpleasant, almost a desert. We would have trouble finding provisions. And we would swing much too close to this place for my comfort."

He tapped the map at a point just northwest of Lake Roghoiz.

"Velalisier?" Valentine said. "The ruins? Why do you look so troubled, Ermanar?"

"An unhealthy place, my lord, a place of foul luck. Spirits wander there. Unavenged crimes stain the air. The stories told of Velalisier are not to my liking."

"Floods to one side of us, haunted ruins to the other, eh?" Valentine smiled. "Why not go south of the river entirely, then?"

"South? No, my lord. You recall the desert through which you came on your journey from Treymone? It’s worse down there, much worse; not a drop of water, nothing to eat but stones and sand. I’d rather march straight through the middle of Velalisier than attempt the southern desert."

"Then we have no choice, do we? The Glayge Valley route it is, then, and let’s hope the flooding isn’t too bad. When do we leave?"

"When do you wish to leave?" Ermanar asked.

"Two hours ago," said Valentine.

—2—

IN EARLY AFTERNOON the forces of Lord Valentine came forth from the Labyrinth through the Mouth of Waters. This gateway was broad and splendidly ornamented, as was fitting for the chief entrance to the Pontifical city, through which Powers traditionally passed. A horde of Labyrinth-dwellers assembled to watch Valentine and his companions ride out.

It was good to see the sun again. It was good to breathe fresh true air once more — and not dry cruel desert air, but the mild sweet soft air of the lower Glayge Valley. Valentine rode in the first of a long procession of floater-cars. He ordered the windows swung open wide. "Like young wine!" he cried, breathing deep. "Ermanar, how can you bear living in the Labyrinth, knowing there’s this just outside?"

"I was born in the Labyrinth," said the officer quietly. "My people have served the Pontifex for fifty generations. We are accustomed to the conditions."

"Do you find the fresh air offensive, then?"

"Offensive?" Ermanar looked startled. "No, no, hardly offensive! I appreciate its qualities, my lord. It seems merely — how shall I say it? — it seems unnecessary to me."

"Not to me," Valentine said, laughing. "And look how green everything looks, how fresh, how new!"

"The autumn rains," said Ermanar. "They bring life to this valley."

"Rather too much life this year, I understand," Carabella said. "Do you know yet how bad the flooding is?"

"I have sent scouts forward," Ermanar replied. "We’ll soon have word."

Onward the caravan rolled, through a placid and gentle countryside just north of the river. The Glayge did not look particularly unruly here, Valentine thought — a quiet meandering stream, silvery in the late sunlight. But of course this was not the true river, only a sort of canal, built thousands of years ago to link Lake Roghoiz and the Labyrinth. The Glayge itself, he remembered, was far more impressive, swift and wide, a noble river, though hardly more than a rivulet by comparison with the titanic Zimr of the other continent. His other time at the Labyrinth, Valentine had ridden the Glayge by summer, and a dry summer at that, and it had seemed calm enough; but this was a different season, and Valentine wanted no more taste of rivers in flood, for his memories of the roaring Steiche were still keen. If they had to go north a bit, that was all right; even if they had to go through the Velalisier ruins, it would not be so bad, though the superstitious Ermanar might need comforting.

That night Valentine felt the first direct counter-thrust of the usurper. As he lay sleeping there came upon him a sending of the King, baleful and stark.

He felt first a warmth in his brain, a quickly gathering heat that became a raging conflagration and pressed with furious intensity against the throbbing walls of his skull. He felt a needle of brilliant light probing his soul. He felt the pounding of agonizing pulsations behind his forehead. And with these sensations came something even more painful, a spreading sense of guilt and shame pervading his spirit, an awareness of failure, of defeat, accusations of having betrayed and cheated the people he had been chosen to govern.

Valentine accepted the sending until he could take no more. At last he cried out and woke, bathed in sweat, shivering, shaken, as bruised by a dream as he had ever been.

"My lord?" Carabella whispered.

He sat up, covered his face with his hands. For a moment he was unable to speak. Carabella cradled him against her, stroking his head.

"Sending," he managed to say at last. "Of the King."

"It’s gone, love, it’s over, it’s all over." She rocked back and forth, embracing him, and gradually the terror and panic ebbed from him. He looked up.

"The worst," he said. "Worse than that one in Pidruid, our first night."

"Can I do anything for you?"

"No. I don’t think so." Valentine shook his head. "They’ve found me," he whispered. "The King has a reading on me, and he’ll never leave me alone now."

"It was only a nightmare, Valentine—"

"No. No. A sending of the King. The first of many."

"I’ll get Deliamber," she said. "He’ll know what to do."

"Stay here, Carabella. Don’t leave me."

"It’s all right now. You can’t have a sending while you’re awake."

"Don’t leave me," he murmured.

But she soothed him and coaxed him into lying down again; and then she went for the wizard, who looked grave and troubled, and touched Valentine to put him into a sleep without dreams.

The next night he feared to sleep at all. But sleep finally came, and with it a sending again, more terrifying than the last. Images danced in his mind — bubbles of light with hideous faces, and blobs of color that mocked and jeered and accused, and darting silvers of hot radiance that held a stabbing impact. And then Metamorphs, fluid, eerie, circling around him, waving long thin fingers at him, laughing in shrill hollow tones, calling him coward, weakling, fool, babe. And loathsome oily voices singing in distorted echoes the little children’s song:

Laughter, discordant music, whispers just beyond the threshold of his hearing — skeletons in long rows, dancing — the dead Skandar brothers, ghastly and mutilated, calling his name—

Valentine forced himself to wake, and paced, haggard and drained, for hours in the cramped floater.

And a night later came a third sending, worse than the other two.

"Am I never to sleep again?" he demanded.

Deliamber visited him with the hierarch Lorivade as he sat slumped, white-faced, exhausted. "I have heard of your troubles," Lorivade said. "Has the Lady not shown you how to defend yourself with your circlet?"

Valentine looked at her blankly. "What do you mean?"

"One Power may not assail another, my lord." She touched the silver band at his forehead. "This will ward off attack, if you use it properly."

"And how is that?"

"As you prepare yourself for sleep," she said, "weave about yourself a wall of force. Project your identity; fill the air around you with your spirit. No sending can harm you then."

"Will you train me?"

"I will try, my lord."

In his sapped and wearied condition it was all he could do to project a shadow of strength, let alone the full potency of a Coronal; and even though Lorivade drilled him for an hour in the exercise of using the circlet, a fourth sending came to him that night. But it was weaker than the others, and he was able to escape its worst effects, and sleep of a restful kind finally embraced him. By day he felt nearly restored to himself; and he drilled with the circlet for hours.

Other sendings came to him on the nights that followed — faint, probing ones, testing for some opening in his armor. With growing confidence Valentine warded them off. He felt the strain of constant vigilance, and it weakened him; and there were few nights when he did not sense the tendrils of the King of Dreams attempting to steal into his sleeping soul; but he maintained his guard and went unharmed.

For five days more they made their way north along the lower Glayge, and on the sixth Ermanar’s scouts returned with news of the territories ahead.

"The flooding is not as severe as we had heard," Ermanar said.

Valentine nodded. "Excellent. We’ll continue on to the lake, then, and take ship there?"

"There are hostile forces between us and the lake."

"The Coronal’s?"

"One would assume so, my lord. The scouts said only that they ascended Lumanzar Ridge, which gives a view of the lake and the surrounding plain, and saw troops camped there, and a considerable force of mollitors."

"War at last!" Lisamon Hultin cried. She sounded far from displeased.

"No," Valentine said somberly. "This is too early. We are thousands of miles from Castle Mount. We can hardly begin battling so far south. Besides, it’s still my hope to avoid warfare altogether — or at least to delay it until the last."

"What will you do, my lord?"

"Proceed north through the Glayge Valley, as we’ve been doing, but begin moving northwest if there’s any movement toward us by that army. I mean to go around them, if we can, and sail up the river behind them, leaving them sitting down at Roghoiz still waiting for us to appear."

Ermanar blinked. "Go around?"

"Unless I miss my guess, the Barjazid has put them there to guard the approach to the lake. They won’t follow us very far inland."

"But inland—"

"Yes, I know." Valentine let his hand rest lightly on Ermanar’s shoulder and said softly, with all the warmth and sympathy at his command, "Forgive me, friend, but I think we may have to detour as far from the river as Velalisier."

"Those ruins frighten me, my lord, and I am not the only one."

"Indeed. But we have a powerful wizard in our company, and many brave folk. What can a ghost or two do against the likes of Lisamon Hultin, of Khun or Kianimot, or Sleet, or Carabella? Or Zalzan Kavol? We’ll just let the Skandar roar at them a bit, and they’ll run all the way to Stoien!"

"My lord, your word is law. But since I was a boy I have heard dark tales of Velalisier."

"Have you ever been there?"

"Naturally not."

"Do you know anyone who has?"

"No, my lord."

"Can you say, then, that you have knowledge, certain knowledge, of the perils of the place?"

Ermanar toyed with the coils of his beard. "No, my lord."

"But ahead of us lies an army of our enemy, and a horde of ugly mollitors of war, eh? We have no idea what ghosts can do to us, but we’re quite sure of the troubles warfare can bring. I say sidestep the fighting, and take our chances with the ghosts."

"I would prefer it the other way round," said Ermanar, managing a smile. "But I will be at your side, my lord, even if you ask me to go on foot through Velalisier on a night of no moon. You may rely on that."

"I will," said Valentine. "And we will come forth from Velalisier unharmed by its phantoms, Ermanar. You may rely on that."

For the time being they continued on the road they had been traveling, keeping the Glayge to their right. The land gradually rose as they moved north — not yet the great surge that marked the foothills of Castle Mount, Valentine knew, but only a minor step-stage, an outer ripple of that vast up-thrusting of the planet’s skin. Soon the river lay a hundred feet below them in the valley, a narrow bright thread bordered by thick wild brush. And now the road wound by switchbacks up the side of a long tilted block of terrain that Ermanar said was Lumanzar Ridge, from the summit of which one could see for an extraordinary distance.

With Deliamber, Sleet, and Ermanar, Valentine went to the rim of the ridge to take stock of the situation. Below, the land swept away in natural terraced contours, level after level descending the ridge to the broad huge plain in which Lake Roghoiz was the centerpiece.

The lake looked enormous, almost an ocean. Valentine remembered it as large, as well it should be, for the Glayge drained the entire southwestern slope of Castle Mount and fed virtually all its waters into this lake; but the size he remembered was nothing like this. Now he knew why the towns at the lake’s margin all were built high on pilings: those towns now were no longer at the lake’s margin, but deep within its bounds, and the water must be lapping at the lower stories of the stilt-bottomed buildings. "It is much swollen," he said to Ermanar.

"Yes, almost twice its usual area, I think. Still, the tales we heard made it even worse."

"As is often the case," Valentine said. "And where is the army your scouts saw?"

Ermanar scanned the horizon a long moment with his seeing-tube. Perhaps, Valentine thought eagerly, they have packed up and gone back to the Mount, or maybe it was an error of the scouts, no army here at all, or possibly—"

There, my lord," Ermanar said finally.

Valentine took the tube and peered down the ridge. At first he saw only trees and meadows and stray outfloodings of the lake; but Ermanar directed the tube, and suddenly Valentine saw. To the naked eye the soldiers had seemed like a congregation of ants near the edge of the lake. But these were no ants.

Camped by the lake were perhaps a thousand troops, perhaps fifteen hundred — not a gigantic army, but large enough on a world where the concept of war was all but forgotten. They outnumbered Valentine’s forces several times over. Grazing nearby were eighty or a hundred mollitors — massive armor-plated creatures, of synthetic origins from the ancient days. In the knightly games on Castle Mount mollitors often were used as instruments of combat. They moved with surprising swiftness on their short thick legs, and were capable of great feats of destruction, poking their heavy black-jawed heads out of their impervious carapaces to snap and crush and rend. Valentine had seen them rip up an entire field with their fierce curved claws as they lumbered back and forth, crashing up against one another and butting heads in dull-witted rage. A dozen of them, blocking a road, would be as effective a barrier as a wall.

Sleet said, "We could take them by surprise, send one squad down to drive the mollitors into confusion, and swing around on them from the other side when—"

"No" Valentine said. "It would be a mistake to fight."

"If you think," Sleet persisted, "that you’re going to regain Castle Mount without anybody’s suffering so much as a cut finger, my lord, you—"

"I expect there to be bloodshed," said Valentine crisply. "But I intend to minimize it. Those troops down there are the troops of the Coronal; remember that, and remember who is truly Coronal. They are not the enemy. Dominin Barjazid is the only enemy. We will fight only when we must, Sleet."

"Change routes as planned, then?" Ermanar asked glumly.

"Yes. We go northwest, out toward Velalisier. Then swing around the far side of the lake, and up the valley toward Pendiwane, if there are no more armies waiting for us between here and there. Do you have maps?"

"Just of the valley and the road to Velalisier, perhaps halfway. The rest’s only wasteland, my lord, and the maps show very little."

"Then we’ll manage without maps," said Valentine. As the caravan moved back down Lumanzar Ridge to the crossroads that would take them away from the lake, Valentine summoned the brigand Duke Nascimonte to his car. "We are heading toward Velalisier," he said, "and may need to go right through it. Are you familiar with that area?"

"I was there once, my lord, when I was much younger."

"Looking for ghosts?"

"Looking for treasures of the ancients, to decorate my mansion-house. I found very little. The place must have been well plundered when it fell."

"You had no fears, then, of looting a haunted city?"

Nascimonte shrugged. "I knew the legends. I was younger, and not very timid."

"Speak with Ermanar," Valentine said, "and introduce yourself as one who has been to Velalisier and lived to tell the tale. Can you guide us through it?"

"My memories of the place are forty years old, my lord. But I’ll do my best."

Studying the patchy, incomplete maps Ermanar provided, Valentine concluded that the only road that would not take them perilously near the army waiting by the lake would in fact bring them almost to the edge of the ruined city, if not actually into it. He would not regret that. The Velalisier ruins, however much they terrified the credulous, were by all reports a noble sight; and besides, Dominin Barjazid was unlikely to have troops waiting for him out there. The detour could be turned to advantage, if the false Coronal expected Valentine to take the predictable route up the Glayge: perhaps, if desert travel did not prove too taxing, they might be able to keep away from the river much of the way north, and gain the benefit of some surprise as they turned at last toward Castle Mount.

Let Velalisier produce what ghosts it may, Valentine thought. Better to dine with phantoms than to march down Lumanzar Ridge into the jaws of Barjazid’s mollitors.

—3—

THE ROAD AWAY FROM the lake led through increasingly more arid terrain. The thick dark alluvial soil of the flood-plain gave way to light, gritty, brick-red stuff that supported a skimpy population of gnarled and thorny plants. The road grew rougher here, no longer paved, just an irregular gravel-strewn track winding gradually upward into the low hills that divided the Roghoiz district from the desert of Velalisier Plain.

Ermanar sent out scouts, hoping to find a passable road on the lakeward side of the hills and thus avoid having to approach the ruined city. There was none, nothing but a few hunters’ trails crossing country too rugged for their vehicles. Over the hills it was, then, and down into the haunted regions beyond.

In late afternoon they began the descent of the far side. Heavy clouds were gathering — the trailing edge, perhaps, of some storm system now buffeting the upper Glayge Valley — and sunset, when it came, spread over the western sky like a great bloody stain. Just before darkness a rift appeared in the overcast and a triple beam of dark red light burst through, illuminating the plain, bathing in strange dreamlike radiance the sprawling immensity of the Velalisier ruins.

Great blocks of blue stone littered the landscape. A mighty wall of shaped monoliths, two and in some places three courses high, ran for more than a mile at the western edge of the city, ending abruptly in a heap of tumbled stone cubes. Closer at hand the outlines of vast shattered buildings still were visible, a whole forum of palaces and courtyards and basilicas and temples, half buried in the drifting sands of the plain. To the east rose a row of six colossal narrow-based sharp-topped pyramids set close together in a straight line, and the stump of a seventh, which had been dismantled apparently with furious energy, for its fragments lay strewn across a wide arc around it. Just ahead, where the mountain road made its entry into the city, were two broad stone platforms, eight or ten feet above the surface of the plain and wide enough for the maneuvers of a substantial army. In the distance Valentine saw the huge oval form of what might have been an arena, high-walled, many-windowed, breached at one end by a rough ragged gap. The scale of everything was astonishing, that and the enormous area. This place made the nameless ruins on the other side of the Labyrinth, where Duke Nascimonte had first found them, seem trivial indeed.

The rift in the clouds suddenly closed. The last daylight disappeared; the destroyed city became a place of mere formless confusion, chaotic humps against the desert skyline, as night descended.

Nascimonte said, "The road, my lord, runs between those platforms, through the group of buildings just behind them, and around the six pyramids, going out by the northeast side. It will be difficult to follow in the dark, even by moonlight."

"We won’t try to follow it in the dark. We’ll camp here and go through in the morning. I plan to explore the ruins tonight, as long as we’re here." That brought a grunt and a muffled cough from Ermanar. Valentine glanced at the little officer, whose face was drawn and bleak. "Courage," he murmured. "I think the ghosts will let us be, this evening."

"My lord, this is not a joking matter for me."

"I mean no mockery, Ermanar."

"You will go into the ruins alone?"

"Alone? No, I don’t think so. Deliamber, will you accompany me? Sleet? Carabella? Zalzan Kavol? And you, Nascimonte — you’ve survived them once; you have less to fear in there than any of us. What do you say?"

The bandit chieftain smiled. "I am yours to command, Lord Valentine."

"Good. And you, Lisamon?"

"Of course, my lord."

"Then we have a party of seven explorers. We’ll set out after dinner."

"Eight explorers, my lord," said Ermanar quietly.

Valentine frowned. "There’s scarcely any need for—"

"My lord, I swore to remain at your side until the Castle is yours again. If you go into the dead city, I go into the dead city with you. If the dangers are unreal, there is nothing to fear, and if they are real, my place is with you. Please, my lord."

Ermanar seemed entirely sincere. His face was tense, his expression strained, but more, Valentine thought, out of concern that he might be excluded from the expedition than out of fear of what might lurk in the ruins.

"Very well," said Valentine. "A party of eight." The moon was nearly full that evening, and its cold brilliant light illuminated the city in fine detail, mercilessly revealing the effects of thousands of years of abandonment in a way that the softer, more fantastical red glow of twilight had not. At the entrance, a worn and nearly illegible marker proclaimed Velalisier to be a royal historic preserve, by order of Lord Siminave the Coronal and the Pontifex Calintane. But they had ruled some five thousand years ago, and it did not seem as though much maintenance had been practiced here since their day. The stones of the two great platforms that flanked the road were cracked and uneven. In the furrows between them grew small ropy-stemmed weeds that with irresistible patience were prying the huge blocks apart: already in some places canyons were opening between block and block, wide enough for sizable shrubs to have taken root. Conceivably in another century or two a forest of twisted woody vegetation would hold possession of these platforms and the mighty square blocks would be wholly lost to view.

Valentine said, "All this must be cleared away. I’ll have the ruins restored to the way they were before this overgrowth began to sprout. How could such neglect have been permitted?"

"No one cares about this place," said Ermanar. "No one will lift a finger for this place."

"Because of the ghosts?" Valentine asked.

"Because it’s Metamorph," Nascimonte said. "That makes it doubly accursed."

"Doubly?"

"You don’t know the story, my lord?"

"Tell me."

Nascimonte said, "This is the legend I was raised on, at any rate. When the Metamorphs ruled Majipoor, Velalisier was their capital, oh, twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago. It was the greatest city on the planet. Two or three million of them lived here, and from all over Alhanroel came people of the outlying tribes, bringing tribute. They held Shapeshifter festivals on top of these platforms, and every thousand years they held a special festival, a superfestival, and to mark each of those they built a pyramid, so the city was at least seven thousand years old. But evil took hold here. I don’t know what sort of things a Metamorph would regard as evil, but whatever they were, they were practiced here. This was the capital city of all abominations. And the Metamorphs of the provinces grew disgusted, and then they grew outraged, and one day they marched in here and smashed the temples and pulled down most of the city walls and destroyed the places where the evils were practiced and drove the citizens into exile and slavery. We know they weren’t massacred, because there’s been plenty of treasure-digging here — I’ve done a little of it myself, as you know — and if there were a few million skeletons buried here, they’d have been found. So the place was torn apart and abandoned, long before the first humans came here, and a curse was put on it. The rivers that fed the city were dammed and diverted. The entire plain became a desert. And for fifteen thousand years no one has lived here except the ghosts of those who died when the city was destroyed."

"Tell the rest of it," said Ermanar.

Nascimonte shrugged. "That’s all I know, mate."

"The ghosts," Ermanar said. "Those who haunt here. Do you know how long they’re fated to wander the ruins? Until Metamorphs rule Majipoor again. Until the planet is returned to them, and the last of us are made into slaves. And then Velalisier will be rebuilt on the old site, grander ever than it was before, and it’ll be reconsecrated as the Shapeshifter capital, and the spirits of the dead finally will be released from the stones that hold them trapped here."

"They’ll cling to the stones a long time, then," said Sleet. "Twenty billion of us and just a handful of them, living in the jungles — what kind of a threat is that?"

Ermanar said, "They’ve waited eight thousand years already, since Lord Stiamot broke their power. They’ll wait eight thousand more, if they have to. But they dream of Velalisier reborn, and they won’t give up that dream. Sometimes in sleep I’ve listened to them, planning for the day when the towers of Velalisier rise again, and it frightens me. That’s why I don’t like to be here. I feel them watching over the place — I can feel their hatred all around us, like something in the air, something invisible but real—"

"So this city is accursed by them and holy to them both at once," Carabella said. "Small wonder we have trouble comprehending how their minds work!"

Valentine wandered off down the path. The city awed him. He tried to imagine it as it had been, a kind of prehistoric Ni-moya, a place of majesty and opulence. And now? Lizards with beady clicking eyes scuttered from rock to rock. Weeds grew thick in the grand ceremonial boulevards. Twenty thousand years! What would Ni-moya look like in twenty thousand years? Or Pidruid, or Piliplok, or the fifty great cities on the slopes of Castle Mount? Were they building here on Majipoor a civilization that would endure forever, as the civilization of the old mother-world Earth was said to endure? Or, he wondered, would wide-eyed tourists someday prowl the shattered ruins of the Castle and the Labyrinth and the Isle, trying to guess what significance they had had to the ancients? We have done well enough so far, Valentine told himself, thinking back over the thousands of years of peace and stability. But now dissonances were breaking through; the ordered pattern of things had been disrupted; there was no telling what might befall. The Metamorphs, the defeated and evicted Metamorphs whose misfortune it had been to possess a world desired by other and stronger folk, might yet have the last laugh.

Suddenly he halted. What was that sound ahead? A footfall? And a flicker of shadow against the rocks? Valentine peered tensely into the darkness before him. An animal, he thought. Something nocturnal slithering around in search of a meal. Ghosts don’t have shadows, do they? Do they? There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts anywhere.

But all the same—

Cautiously he edged forward a few steps. Too dark here, too many avenues of tumbledown structures leading off to every side. He had laughed at Ermanar; but Ermanar’s fears had somehow insinuated themselves into his imagination. He had fantasies of austere mysterious Metamorphs gliding between the fallen buildings just beyond his vision — phantoms half as old as time — forms without bodies, shapes without substance—

And then footsteps, unmistakable footsteps, behind him—

Valentine whirled. Ermanar was trotting after him, that was all.

"Wait, my lord!"

Valentine allowed him to catch up. He forced himself to relax, though his fingers, strangely, were trembling. He put his hands behind his back.

"You ought not go off by yourself," Ermanar said. "I know you make light of the dangers I imagine here, but those dangers might yet exist. You owe it to us all to take more care of your safety, my lord."

The others rejoined him, and they continued on, slowly and in silence, through the moonlit ruins. Valentine said nothing of what he had thought he had seen and heard. Surely it had been only some animal. And shortly animals appeared: some sort of small apes, perhaps akin to forest-brethren, that nested in the fallen buildings and several times caused startlement as they went scrambling over the stones. And nocturnal mammals of a lower kind, mintuns or droles, darted swiftly through the shadows. But did apes and droles, Valentine wondered, make sounds like footfalls?

For more than an hour the eight moved deeper into the ruins. Valentine stared warily into the recesses and caverns, studying the pools of blackness with care.

As they passed through the fragments of a collapsed basilica, Sleet, who had gone off a short way by himself, jogged back in distress to tell Valentine, "I heard something strange to one side, in there."

"A ghost, Sleet?"

"It might be, for all I know. Or simply a bandit."

"Or a rock-monkey," Valentine said lightly. "I’ve heard all kinds of noises."

"My lord—"

"Are you catching Ermanar’s terrors now?"

"I think we have wandered here long enough, my lord," said Sleet in a low, taut voice.

Valentine shook his head. "We’ll keep close watch on dark corners. But there’s more to see here."

"I wish we would turn back now, my lord."

"Courage, Sleet."

The juggler shrugged and turned away. Valentine peered into the darkness. He did not underestimate the acuteness of Sleet’s hearing, he who juggled blindfolded by sheer sound alone. But to flee this place of marvels because they heard odd rustlings and footsteps in the distance — no, not so soon, not so hastily.

Yet, without communicating his uneasiness to the others, he moved still more cautiously. Ermanar’s ghosts might not exist, yet it was folly to be too rash in this strange city.

And as they were exploring one of the most ornate of the buildings in the central area of palaces and temples, Zalzan Kavol, who was leading the way, stopped short abruptly when a slab of rock, dislodged from above, came clattering down practically at his feet. He cursed and growled, "Those stinking apes—"

"No, not apes, I think," said Deliamber quietly. "There’s something bigger up there."

Ermanar flashed a light toward the overhanging ledge of an adjoining structure. For an instant a silhouette that might have been human was in view; then it vanished. Without hesitating Lisamon Hultin began to run to the far side of the building, followed by Zalzan Kavol, who brandished his energy-thrower. Sleet and Carabella went the other way. Valentine would have gone with them, but Ermanar caught him by the arm and held him with surprising strength, saying apologetically, "I may not permit you to place yourself in risk, my lord, when we have no idea—"

"Halt!" came the mighty booming voice of Lisamon Hultin.

There was the sound of a scuffle in the distance, and then that of someone clambering over the mounds of fallen masonry in no very ghostlike way. Valentine longed to know what was happening, but Ermanar was right: to go darting off after an unknown enemy in the darkness of an unfamiliar place was a privilege denied to the Coronal of Majipoor.

He heard grunts and cries, and a high-pitched sound of pain. Moments later Lisamon Hultin reappeared, dragging a figure who wore the starburst emblem of the Coronal on his shoulder. She had her arm locked about his chest and his feet were dangling six inches off the ground.

"Spies," she said. "Skulking around up there, keeping watch on us. There were two of them, I think."

"Where’s the other?" Valentine asked.

"Might have gotten away," said the giantess. "Zalzan Kavol went after him." She dumped her prisoner down before Valentine, and held him to the ground with a foot pressed against his middle.

"Let him up," Valentine said.

The man rose. He looked terrified. Brusquely Ermanar and Nascimonte checked him for weapons and found none.

"Who are you?" Valentine asked. "What are you doing here?"

No reply.

"You can speak. We won’t harm you. You have the starburst on your arm. Are you part of the Coronal’s forces?"

A nod.

"Sent out here to trail us?"

Again a nod.

"Do you know who I am?"

The man stared silently at Valentine.

"Are you able to speak?" Valentine asked. "Do you have a voice? Say something. Anything."

"I— if I—"

"Good. You can talk. Again: do you know who I am?"

In a thin whisper the captive replied, "They say you would steal the throne from the Coronal."

"No," Valentine said. "You have it wrong, fellow. The thief is he who sits now on Castle Mount. I am Lord Valentine, and I demand your allegiance."

The man stared, bewildered, uncomprehending.

"How many of you were up there?" Valentine asked.

"Please, sir—"

"How many?" Sullen silence.

"Let me twist his arm a little," Lisamon Hultin begged.

"That won’t be necessary." Valentine moved closer to the cowering man and said gently, "You understand nothing of this, but all will be made clear in time. I am the true Coronal, and by the oath you swore to serve me, I ask you now to answer. How many of you were up there?"

Conflicts raged in the man’s face. Slowly, reluctantly, be-wilderedly, he replied, "Just two of us, sir."

"Can I believe that?"

"By the Lady, sir!"

"Two of you. All right. How long were you following us?"

"Since — since Lumanzar."

"Under what orders?"

Hesitation again. "To — to observe your movements and report to camp in the morning."

Ermanar scowled. "Which means that other one is probably halfway to the lake by now."

"You think so?"

It was the rough, harsh voice of Zalzan Kavol. The Skandar strode into their midst and dumped down before Valentine, as though it were a sack of vegetables, the body of a second figure wearing the starburst emblem. Zalzan Kavol’s energy-thrower had seared a hole through him from back to front. "I chased him about half a mile, my lord. A quick devil he was, too! He was moving more easily than I over the heaps of stones, and starting to pull away from me. I ordered him to stop, but he kept going, and so—"

"Bury him somewhere off the path," Valentine said curtly.

"My lord? Did I do wrong to kill him?"

"You had no choice," Valentine said in a softer tone. "I wish you had managed to catch him. But you couldn’t, so you had no choice. Very well, Zalzan Kavol."

Valentine turned away. The slaying had shaken him, and he could hardly pretend otherwise. This man had died only because he was loyal to the Coronal, or to the person he believed to be the Coronal.

The civil war had had its first casualty. The bloodshed had begun, here in this city of the dead.

—4—

THERE WAS NO THOUGHT of continuing the tour now. They returned with the prisoner to their camp. And in the morning Valentine gave orders to move on through Velalisier and begin the northeastward swing.

By day the ruined city seemed not as magical, although no less impressive. It was hard to understand how so frail and unmechanical a folk as the Metamorphs had ever moved these giant blocks of stone about; but perhaps twenty thousand years ago they had not been quite so unmechanical. The glowering Shapeshifters of the Piurifayne forests, those people of wicker huts and muddy streets, were only the broken remnant of the race that once had ruled Majipoor.

Valentine vowed to return here, once this business with Dominin Barjazid was settled, and explore the ancient capital in detail, clearing underbrush and excavating and reconstructing. If possible, he thought, he would invite Metamorph leaders to take part in that work — though he doubted they would care to cooperate. Something was needed to reopen lines of communication between the two populations of the planet.

"If I am Coronal again," he said to Carabella as the cavalcade rode past the pyramids and headed out of Velalisier, "I intend—"

"When you are Coronal again," she said.

Valentine smiled. "When I am Coronal again, yes. I intend to examine the entire problem of the Metamorphs. Bring them back into the mainstream of Majipooran life, if that can be done. Give them a place in the government, even."

"If they’ll have it."

"I mean to overcome that anger of theirs," said Valentine. "I’ll dedicate my reign to it. Our entire society, our wonderful and harmonious and loving realm, was founded on an act of theft and injustice, Carabella, and we’ve succeeded in teaching ourselves to overlook that."

Sleet glanced up. "The Shapeshifters weren’t making full use of this planet. There weren’t twenty million of them on the entire enormous place when our ancestors came here."

"But it was theirs!" Carabella cried. "By what right—"

"Easily, easily," Valentine said. "There’s no use fighting over the deeds of the first settlers. What’s done is done, and we must live with it. But it’s within our power to change the way we’ve been living with it, and if I’m Coronal again, I—"

"When," said Carabella.

"When," Valentine echoed.

Deliamber said mildly, in that far-off way of his that gained the immediate attention of all listeners, "It may be that the present troubles of the realm are the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs."

Valentine stared at him. "What do you mean by that?"

"Only that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account accumulates interest, you know. And now this usurpation, the evils of the new Coronal, the prospect facing us of war, death and destruction, chaos — perhaps the past is starting to send us its reckoning at last."

"But Valentine had nothing to do with the oppression of the Metamorphs," Carabella protested. "Why should he be the one to suffer? Why was he chosen to be cast down from power, and not some high-handed Coronal of long ago?"

Deliamber shrugged. "Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?"

"The Divine—"

"Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process."

"More than that," said Valentine suddenly. "It may be that I was chosen to be an instrument of Deliamber’s compensating forces, and it was necessary for me to suffer in order to be effective."

"How so?"

"If nothing unusual had ever happened to me, I might have ruled like all the others before me on Castle Mount, self-satisfied, amiable, accepting things as they were because from where I sat I saw no wrong in them. But these adventures of mine have given me a view of the world I’d never have had if I had remained snug in the Castle. And perhaps now I’m ready to play the role that needs to be played, whereas otherwise—" Valentine let his voice trail away. After a moment he said, "All this talk is mere vapor. The first thing to do is regain the Castle. Then we can debate the nature of the compensating forces of the universe and the tactics of the Divine."

He looked back at fallen Velalisier, the accursed city of the ancients, chaotic but yet magnificent on the forlorn desert plain. And then he turned away to sit in silence and contemplate the changing countryside ahead.

The road now curved about sharply toward the northeast, passing up and over the range of hills they had crossed to the south, and descending into the fertile flood-plain of the Glayge near the northernmost limb of Lake Roghoiz. They were emerging hundreds of miles north of the field where the Coronal’s army had been camped.

Ermanar, bothered by the presence of the two spies in Velalisier, had sent out scouts to ascertain that the army had not moved north to meet them. Valentine judged that a sensible move; but he did scouting of his own, by way of Deliamber.

"Cast me a spell," he ordered the wizard, "that will tell me where enemy armies lie in wait. Can you do that?"

The Vroon’s great shining golden eyes flickered in amusement. "Can I do that? Can a mount eat grass? Can a sea-dragon swim?"

"Then do it," said Valentine.

Deliamber withdrew and muttered words and waved his tentacles about, coiling and intertwining them in the most intricate of patterns. Valentine suspected that much of Deliamber’s sorcery was staged for the benefit of onlookers, that the real transactions did not involve the waving of tentacles or the muttering of formulas at all, but only the casting forth of Deliamber’s shrewd and sensitive consciousness to pick up the vibrations of outlying realities. But that was all right. Let the Vroon stage his little show. A certain amount of show business, Valentine recognized, was an essential lubricant in many civilized activities, not only those of wizards and jugglers, but those also of the Coronal, the Pontifex, the Lady, the King of Dreams, the speakers of dreams, the teachers of holy mysteries, perhaps even the customs-officials at the provincial boundaries and the sellers of sausages in streetside booths. In plying one’s trade one could not be too bald and blunt; one had to cloak one’s doings in magic, in theater.

Deliamber said, "The troops of the Coronal appear to remain where they were camped."

Valentine nodded. "Good. May they camp there a long while, waiting for us to return from our Velalisier excursion. Can you locate other armies north of here?"

"Not for a great distance," said Deliamber. "I feel the presence of knightly forces gathered on Castle Mount. But there always are. I detect minor detachments here and there in the Fifty Cities. But nothing unusual about that either. The Coronal has plenty of time. He’ll simply sit at the Castle and wait for you to approach. And then will come the grand mobilization. What will you do, Valentine, when a million warriors march down Castle Mount toward you?"

"Do you think I’ve given that no thought?"

"I know you’ve thought of little else. But it needs some heavy thinking about — our hundreds against their millions."

"A million is a clumsy size for an army," said Valentine easily. "Far simpler to do one’s juggling with clubs than with the trunks of dwikka-trees. Are you frightened of what lies ahead, Deliamber?"

"Not at all."

"Neither am I," Valentine said.

But of course there was show-business bravado, Valentine knew, in talk of that sort. Was he frightened? No, not really: death comes to all, sooner or later, and to fear it is folly. Valentine knew he had little fear of death, for he had faced it in the forest near Avendroyne, and in the turbulent rapids of the Steiche, and in the belly of the sea-dragon and when wrestling with Farssal on the Isle, and on none of those occasions had he felt anything he could identify as fear. If the army that waited for him on Castle Mount overwhelmed his little force and cut him down, it would be regrettable — as being tumbled to pieces on the rocks of the Steiche would have been regrettable — but the prospect caused him no dread. What he did feel, and it was a more significant thing than fear for his own life, was a degree of fear for Majipoor. If he failed, through hesitation or foolishness or mere inadequacy of strength, the Castle would remain in the hands of the Barjazids, and the course of history would forever change, and ultimately billions of innocent beings would suffer. Preventing that was a high responsibility, and he felt the weight of it. If he died valiantly trying to scale Castle Mount, his hardships at least would be over; but the agonies of Majipoor would only just be beginning.

—5—

NOW THEY TRAVELED through placid rural districts, the perimeter of the great agricultural belt that flanked Castle Mount and supplied the Fifty Cities with produce. Valentine chose main highways at all times. The moment for secrecy was past; so conspicuous a caravan as this could hardly be concealed, and the time was at hand when the world had to learn that a struggle for possession of Lord Valentine’s Castle was about to commence.

The world was starting to learn it, in any case. Ermanar’s scouts, returning from the city of Pendiwane farther up the Glayge, brought news of the usurper’s first countermeasures.

"No armies lie between us and Pendiwane," Ermanar reported. "But posters are up in the city, branding you a rebel and a subversive, an enemy of society. The proclamations of the Pontifex in your favor have not yet been announced, it seems. Citizens of Pendiwane are being urged to band together in militias to defend their rightful Coronal and the true order of things against your uprising. And sendings are widespread."

Valentine frowned. "Sendings? What sort of sendings?"

"Of the King. Apparently you can scarcely fall asleep at night but the King is in your dreams, buzzing to you about loyalty and warning of terrible consequences if the Coronal is overthrown."

"Naturally," Valentine muttered. "He’d have the King working for him with all the energy at his command. They must be sending night and day in Suvrael. But we’ll turn that against him, eh?" He looked to Deliamber. "The King of Dreams is telling the people how dreadful it is to overthrow a Coronal. Good. I want them to believe exactly that. I want them to realize that a terrifying thing has already happened to Majipoor, and that it’s up to the people to put things to rights."

"Nor is the King of Dreams precisely a disinterested party in this war," Deliamber said. "We should make them aware of that too — that he stands to gain from his son’s treachery."

"We will," said the hierarch Lorivade vehemently. "Out of the Isle now are coming the sendings of the Lady with redoubled force. They’ll counteract the King’s poisonous dreams. Last night as I slept she came to me and showed me what kind of message will go forth. It is the vision of the drugging at Til-omon, the changing of the Coronal. She will show them your new face, Lord Valentine, and will surround you with the radiance of the Coronal, the starburst of authority. And will portray the false Coronal as a traitor, mean and dark of spirit."

"When will this begin?" Valentine asked.

"She waits for your approval."

"Then open your mind to the Lady today," he told the hierarch, "and tell her that the sendings must start."

Khun of Kianimot said quietly, "How strange this seems to me! A war of dreams! If ever I doubted I was on an alien world, these strategies would make it certain to me."

Valentine said, with a smile, "Better to fight with dreams than with swords and energy-throwers, friend. What we seek is best won by persuasion, not by killing."

"A war of dreams," Khun repeated, bemused. "We do things differently on Kianimot. Who’s to say which way makes more sense? But I think there’ll be fighting as well as sendings before this is done, Lord Valentine."

Valentine looked somberly at the blue-skinned being. "I fear you are right," he said.

Five days more and they were in the outlying suburbs of Pendiwane. By now news of their advance had spread throughout the countryside; farmers stopped in their fields to stare as the cavalcade of vehicles floated by, and crowds thronged the highway in the more thickly populated sectors.

Valentine found this all to the good. Thus far no hands were being lifted against them. They were regarded as curiosities, not as menaces. More than that he could not ask.

But when they were a day’s journey outside of Pendiwane, the advance party returned with news that a force was gathered to meet them near the city’s western gate.

"Soldiers?" Valentine asked.

"Citizen-militia," said Ermanar. "Hastily organized, from the looks of them. They wear no uniforms, only ribbons round their arms, with the starburst emblem on it."

"Excellent. The starburst is consecrated to my favor. I’ll go to them and ask their allegiance."

Vinorkis said, "What will you wear, my lord?"

Puzzled, Valentine indicated the simple clothes in which he had been traveling since the Isle of Sleep, a white belted tunic and a light overblouse.

"Why, these, I suppose," he said.

The Hjort shook his head. "You should wear finery, and a crown, I think. I think it very strongly."

"My thought was not to appear overly ostentatious. If they see a man in a crown, whose face is not the face they know as Lord Valentine’s, usurper will be the first thought to come to their minds, will it not?"

"I think otherwise," Vinorkis replied. "You come to them and say, I am your rightful king. But you don’t look like a king. A simple costume and easy manners may win you friends in quiet conversation, but not when large forces are assembled. You would do well to dress more awesomely."

Valentine said, "My hope was to rely on simplicity and sincerity, as I have done ever since Pidruid."

"Simplicity and sincerity, by all means," said Vinorkis. "But also a crown."

"Carabella? Deliamber? Advise me!"

"A little ostentation might not be harmful," said the Vroon.

"And this will be your first public appearance as claimant to the Castle," Carabella said. "Some look of regal splendor, I think, may serve you well."

Valentine laughed. "I’ve grown away from such costumes in these many months of wandering, I fear. The idea of a crown now seems only comic to me. A thing of twisted metal, poking up from my scalp, a bit of jewelry—" He stopped. He saw them all gaping at him. "A crown," he said in a less lighthearted tone, "is only an outward thing, a trinket, an ornament. Children might be impressed by such toys, but adult citizens who—" He stopped again.

Deliamber said, "My lord, can you remember how you felt, the first time they came to you at the Castle and put the starburst upon your brow?"

"There was a chill down my back, I do confess."

"Yes. A crown may be a child’s ornament, a silly trinket, true. But it is also a symbol of power, that sets the Coronal apart from all others, and transforms mere Valentine into Lord Valentine the heir of Lord Prestimion and Lord Confalume and Lord Stiamot and Lord Dekkeret. We live by such symbols. My lord, your mother the Lady did much to restore you to the person you were before Til-omon, but there is still a good deal of Valentine the juggler about you, even now. And that is not a bad thing. Still, more impressiveness and less simplicity is called for here, I suspect."

Valentine was silent, thinking of Deliamber mumbling and waving his tentacles, and his own realization that sometimes one had to indulge in theatrics to achieve one’s proper effects. They were right and he was wrong.

He said, "Very well. I will wear a crown, if one can be fashioned for me in time."

One of Ermanar’s men quickly assembled one for him out of scraps of a defective floater-engine, the only spare metal that was at hand. Considering its hastily improvised nature, it was a decent job of crown-making, Valentine thought, the joinings not too rough, the spokes of the starburst reasonably equally spaced, the inner orbits of the armature smoothly coiled. Of course it was nothing to compare with the authentic crown, with its inlays and chasings of seven different precious metals, its finials of rare gems, its three gleaming diniabastones mounted on the browband. But that crown — made in the great reign of Lord Confalume, who must have taken a hearty joy in all the trappings of imperial pomp — was elsewhere at the moment, and this one, once it took its place upon his consecrated brow, would most likely magically invest itself with the proper grandeur. Valentine held it in his hands a long moment. Despite the scorn for such things he had expressed the day before, he felt a little awed by it himself.

Deliamber said mildly, "The militia of Pendiwane are waiting, my lord."

Valentine nodded. He was garbed in borrowed finery, a green doublet that belonged to one of Ermanar’s comrades, a yellow cloak that Asenhart had produced, a heavy golden chain belonging to the hierarch Lorivade, high glossy boots lined with the white fur of the northern steetmoy, that were contributed by Nascimonte. Not since the ill-fated banquet in Til-omon, when he had worn another body entirely, had he dressed with such gaudiness. It was a strange feeling to be clad so pretentiously. He lacked only the crown.

He started to put it on, and stopped abruptly, realizing that there was history in this moment, whether he liked the idea or not: the first time he donned the starburst in this his second incarnation. Suddenly this event began to seem less like a masquerade and more like a coronation. Valentine looked around uneasily.

"I should not put this on my head myself," he said. "Deliamber, you’re my chief minister. You do it."

"My lord, I am not tall enough."

"I could kneel."

"That would not be fitting," said the Vroon, a little sharply.

Plainly Deliamber did not want to do it. Valentine looked next toward Carabella. But she recoiled, horrified, whispering, "I am a commoner, my lord!"

"What does that have to do with—" Valentine shook his head. This was becoming an annoyance. They were making too much of an occasion out of it. He glanced around the group and saw the hierarch Lorivade, that cool-eyed and stately woman, and said, "You are the representative of the Lady my mother in this group, and you are a woman of rank. May I ask you—"

But Lorivade said gravely, "The crown, my lord, descends to the Coronal by authority of the Pontifex. It seems more fitting that Ermanar place it on you, as the highest official of the Pontifex among us today."

Valentine sighed and turned to Ermanar. "I suppose that’s right. Will you do it?"

"It will be a great honor, my lord."

Valentine handed the crown to Ermanar and moved the silver circlet of his mother as far down his scalp as it would go. Ermanar, who was not a man of great height, took the crown in both hands, trembling a little, and reached up, straining to extend his arms. With great care he lowered the crown over Valentine’s head and slipped it into place. It fit perfectly.

"There," Valentine said. "I’m glad that’s—"

"Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine! Long life to Lord Valentine!"

They were kneeling to him, making the starburst to him, shouting out his name, all of them, Sleet, Carabella, Vinorkis, Lorivade, Zalzan Kavol, Shanamir, everyone, Nascimonte, Asenhart, Ermanar, even — surprisingly — the offworlder Khun of Kianimot.

Valentine gestured in protest, embarrassed at all this, wanting to tell them that this was no true ceremony, that it was done only for the sake of impressing the citizens of Pendiwane. But the words did not leave his throat, for he knew that they were untrue, that this improvised affair was in fact his second crowning. And he felt the chill down his spine, the shiver of wonder.

He stood with arms outspread, accepting their homage.

Then he said, "Come. On your feet, all of you. Pendiwane is waiting for us."

The scouts’ report had it that the militia and the high personages of the city had been camped outside Pendiwane’s western gate for some days, awaiting his arrival. Valentine wondered what the condition of the townspeople’s nerves might be, after so long and uncertain a vigil, and what sort of reception they planned to give him.

It was only an hour’s ride to Pendiwane now. They moved quickly through a region of pleasant forests and broad, rolling, rain-sleekened meadows that soon gave way to agreeable residential districts, small stone houses with conical red-tiled roofs the predominant style. The city ahead was a major one, capital of its province, with a population of twelve or thirteen million; it was chiefly a trade depot, Valentine recalled, through which the agricultural produce of the lower Glayge Valley was funneled on its way upriver to the Fifty Cities.

At least ten thousand militia waited at the gate.

They filled the road, and spilled over into the lanes of the marketplace that nestled against the outer wall of Pendiwane. They were armed with energy-throwers, though not a great many, and with simpler weapons, and those in the front line were standing in a tense, stiff manner, holding themselves self-consciously in soldierlike poses that surely were altogether unfamiliar to them. Valentine ordered the floater-cars to halt a few hundred yards from the nearest of them, so that the roadway between formed a wide clear space, a kind of buffer zone.

He stepped forth, crowned and robed and cloaked. The hierarch Lorivade walked just to his right, clad in the glowing vestments of the Lady’s high ministry, and Ermanar was to his left, wearing on his breast the glittering Labyrinth emblem of the Pontifex. At Valentine’s rear were Zalzan Kavol and his formidable brothers, glowering and massive, followed by Lisamon Hultin in full battle regalia, with Sleet and Carabella flanking her. Autifon Deliamber rode on the arm of the giantess.

In a slow, easy, unmistakably majestic way, Valentine advanced into the open space before him. He saw the citizens of Pendiwane stirring, exchanging troubled glances, moistening their lips, shifting their feet, rubbing their hands over their chests or arms. A terrible silence had fallen.

He paused twenty yards from the front line and said, "Good people of Pendiwane, I am the rightful Coronal of Majipoor, and I ask your aid in regaining that which was granted to me by the will of the Divine and the decree of the Pontifex Tyeveras."

Thousands of wide eyes stared rigidly at him. He felt wholly calm.

Valentine said, "I call forth from among you Duke Holmstorg of Glayge. I call forth from among you Redvard Haligorn, Mayor of Pendiwane."

There were movements in the crowd. Then came a parting, and out from the midst emerged a rotund man in a blue tunic trimmed with orange, whose heavy-fleshed face seemed gray with fear or tension. The black sash of mayoralty lay across his broad chest. He took a few steps toward Valentine, hesitated, signaled furiously behind his back in what was meant to be a gesture unseen by those facing him; and after a moment five or six lesser municipal officials, looking as abashed and reluctant as children commanded to sing at a school assembly, came warily out behind the mayor.

The plump man said, "I am Redvard Haligorn. Duke Holmstorg has been summoned to Lord Valentine’s Castle."

"We have met before, Mayor Haligorn," said Valentine amiably. "Do you recall? It was some years ago, when my brother Lord Voriax was Coronal, and I journeyed to the Labyrinth as emissary to the Pontifex. I stopped in Pendiwane and you gave me a banquet, in the high palace at river’s edge. Do you recall, Mayor Haligorn? It was summer, a year of drought, the river was very much shrunken, nothing at all like it is today."

Haligorn’s tongue traversed his lips. He tugged at a jowl.

Hoarsely he said, "Indeed he who became Lord Valentine was here in the dry year. But he was a dark man, and bearded."

"True. There has been a witchery of fearful nature, Mayor Haligorn. A traitor now holds Castle Mount and I have been transformed and cast out. But I am Lord Valentine and by the power of the starburst you wear on your sleeve I call upon you to accept me as Coronal."

Haligorn looked bewildered. Clearly he would prefer to be almost anywhere else at this moment, even in the trackless corridors of the Labyrinth, or the burning wastes of Suvrael.

Valentine continued, "Beside me is the hierarch Lorivade of the Isle of Sleep, closest of the companions of my mother your Lady. Do you think she deceives you?"

The hierarch said icily, "This is the true Coronal, and the Lady will withdraw her sublime love from those who oppose him."

Valentine said, "And here stands Ermanar, high servitor of the Pontifex Tyeveras."

In his blunt straightforward way Ermanar said, "You have all heard the decree of the Pontifex that the fair-haired man must be hailed as Lord Valentine the Coronal. Who among you will stand up against the decree of the Pontifex?"

Haligorn’s face showed terror. Dealing with Duke Holmstorg might have been harder for Valentine, for he was of high blood and great haughtiness, and might not have been so easily intimidated by one who came before him wearing a home-made crown and leading a little band of such oddly assorted followers. But Redvard Haligorn, a mere elected official, who for years had dealt with nothing more challenging than state banquets and debates over flood-control taxes, was far beyond his depth.

He said, almost mumbling it, "The command has come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle that you are to be apprehended and bound over for trial."

"Many commands lately have come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle," said Valentine, "and not a few have been unwise, unjust, or ill-timed, eh, Mayor Haligorn? They are the commands of the usurper, and worthless. You have heard the voices of the Lady and the Pontifex. You have had sendings urging you to give allegiance to me."

"And sendings of the other kind," said Haligorn feebly.

"From the King of Dreams, yes!" Valentine laughed. "And who is the usurper? Who is it that has stolen the throne of the Coronal? Dominin Barjazid is the one! The son of the King of Dreams! Now do you comprehend those sendings out of Suvrael? Now do you see what has been done to Majipoor?"

Valentine let the trance-state come over him, and flooded the hapless Redvard Haligorn with the full force of his soul, the full impact of a waking sending from the Coronal.

Haligorn tottered. His face reddened and grew blotchy. He reeled and clutched at his comrades for support, but they had received the outflow from Valentine as well, and were barely able to sustain themselves.

Valentine said, "Give me your support, friends. Open your city to me. From here I will launch the reconquest of Castle Mount, and great will be the fame of Pendiwane, as the first city of Majipoor to turn against the usurper!"

—6—

SO PENDIWANE FELL, without a blow being struck. Redvard Haligorn, wearing the expression of a man who has just swallowed a Stoienzar oyster and feels it squirming in his gullet, dropped down and offered Valentine the starburst gesture, and then two of his vice-mayors did the same, and suddenly there was a contagion of it, thousands of people giving homage, and crying out, first without much conviction, then more lustily as they decided to commit themselves to the idea: "Valentine! Lord Valentine! Long life to the Coronal!" And the gates of Pendiwane were opened.

"Too easy," Valentine muttered to Carabella. "Can it continue this way right up Castle Mount? Browbeat a fat mayor or two and win back the throne by acclamation?"

"If only you could," she said. "But the Barjazid waits up there with his bodyguards, and browbeating him will take more than words and fine dramatic effects. There will be battles, Valentine."

"Let there be no more than one, then."

She touched his arm lightly. "For your sake I hope no more than one, and that one just a small one."

"Not for my sake," he said. "For the sake of all the world. I want none of my people to perish in repairing what Dominin Barjazid has brought upon us."

"I had not thought kings would be so gentle, my love," Carabella said.

"Carabella—"

"You look so sad just now!"

"I fear what comes."

"What comes," she said, "is a necessary struggle, and joyous triumph, and the restoration of order. And if you would be a proper king, my lord, wave to your people, and smile, and put that tragic look from your face. Yes?"

Valentine nodded. "You speak the truth," he said, and catching up her hand, brushed his lips quickly but tenderly across her small sharp knuckles. And turned to stare at the multitudes who shouted his name, and lifted his arms to them and acknowledged their greeting.

It seemed wondrously familiar to be riding into a great city down boulevards lined with cheering throngs. Valentine remembered, though it seemed like the memory of a dream, the beginnings of his abortive grand processional, when in the springtime of his reign he had gone by river to Alaisor on the western coast, and across to the Isle to kneel beside his mother at Inner Temple, and then on the great sea-journey westward to Zimroel, and crowds hailing him in Piliplok and Velathys and Narabal, down there in the lush leafy tropics. Those parades, those banquets, the excitement, the splendor, and then on to Til-omon, once more the crowds, once more the cries, "Valentine! Lord Valentine!" He remembered too in Til-omon a surprise, that Dominin Barjazid the son of the King of Dreams had come up from Suvrael to greet him and honor him in a feast, for the Barjazids customarily stayed down there in their sunswept kingdom, dwelling apart from humanity, tending their dream-machines, sending forth their nightly messages to instruct and command and chastise. And the banquet at Til-omon, and the flask of wine from the hand of Barjazid, and the next thing Valentine knew he was staring down at the city of Pidruid from a limestone ridge, with muddled memories in his mind of having grown up in eastern Zimroel and somehow having wandered across the entire continent to its western shore. Now, so many months later, they were shouting his name again in the streets of a mighty city, after the long and strange interruption.

In the royal suite at the mayoral palace Valentine summoned Mayor Haligorn, who still had a stunned and dazed look about him, and said, "I’ll need from you a flotilla of riverboats to take me up the Glayge to its rising. The costs will be met by the imperial treasury after the restoration."

"Yes, my lord."

"And how many troops can you supply me?"

"Troops?"

"Troops, militia, warriors, bearers of arms. Do you follow my meaning, Mayor Haligorn?"

The mayor showed dismay. "We of Pendiwane are not known for our skills in warfare, my lord."

Valentine smiled. "We are not known for our skills in warfare anywhere on Majipoor, the Divine be thanked. Nevertheless, peaceful though we are, we fight when we are threatened. The usurper threatens us all. Haven’t you felt the sting of strange new taxes and unfamiliar decrees in this year just past?"

"Of course, but—"

"But what?" Valentine asked sharply.

"We assumed it was only a new Coronal, feeling his power."

"And you would blandly let yourselves be oppressed by the one whose role it is to serve you?"

"My lord—"

"Never mind. You have as much to gain as I in putting things to rights, do you see? Give me an army, Mayor Haligorn, and for thousands of years the bravery of the people of Pendiwane will be sung in our ballads."

"I am responsible for the lives of my people, my lord. I would not have them slain or—"

"I am responsible for the lives of your people, and twenty billion others besides," said Valentine briskly. "And if five drops of anyone’s blood are shed as I move toward Castle Mount, that will be six drops too many to suit me. But without an army I’m too vulnerable. With an army I become a royal presence, an imperial force moving toward a reckoning with the enemy. Do you understand, Haligorn? Call your people together, tell them what must be done, call for volunteers."

"Yes, my lord," said Haligorn, trembling.

"And see to it that the volunteers are willing to volunteer!"

"It will be done, my lord," the mayor murmured.

Assembling the army went faster than Valentine expected — a matter of days for choosing, equipping, and provisioning. Haligorn was cooperative indeed — as though he were eager to see Valentine rapidly on his way to some other region.

The citizen-militia that had been scraped together to defend Pendiwane against an invading pretender now became the nucleus of the hastily constructed loyalist army — some twenty thousand men and women. A city of thirteen million might well have produced a larger force; but Valentine had no wish to disrupt Pendiwane to any greater extent. Nor had he forgotten his own axiom about juggling with clubs rather than with dwikka-trunks. Twenty thousand troops provided him with something that looked decently military, and it was his strategy, as it had been for a long while, to gain his purpose by gradual accumulation of support. Even the colossal Zimr, he reasoned, begins as mere trickles and rivulets somewhere in the northern mountains.

They set forth on the Glayge on a day that was rainy before dawn, gloriously bright and sunny afterward. Every riverboat for fifty miles on either side of Pendiwane had been commandeered for army transport. Serenely the great flotilla moved northward, the green-and-gold banners of the Coronal waving in the breeze.

Valentine stood near the prow of his flagship. Carabella was beside him, and Deliamber, and Admiral Asenhart of the Isle. The rain-washed air smelled sweet and clean: the good fresh air of Alhanroel, blowing toward him from Castle Mount. It was a fine feeling to be on his way home at last.

These riverboats of eastern Alhanroel were more streamlined, less fancifully baroque, than the ones Valentine had known on the Zimr. They were big, simple vessels, high of draft and narrow of beam, with powerful engines designed to drive them against the strong flow of the Glayge.

"The river is swift against us," said Asenhart.

"As well it should be," Valentine said. He pointed toward some invisible summit far to the north and high in the sky. "It rises on the lower slopes of the Mount. In its few thousand miles it drops almost ten, and all the weight of that water comes rushing against us as we go toward the source."

The Hjort seaman smiled. "It makes ocean sailing seem like child’s play, to think of coping with such a force. Rivers always were strange to me — so narrow, so quick. Give me the open sea, dragons and all, and I’m happy!"

But the Glayge, though swift, was tame. Long ago it had been a thing of rapids and waterfalls, ferocious and all but innavigable for hundreds of miles. Fourteen thousand years of human settlement on Majipoor had changed all that. By dams, locks, bypass canals, and other devices, the Glayge, like all the Six Rivers that descended from the Mount, had been made to serve the needs of its masters through nearly all its course. Only in the lower stretches, where the flatness of the surrounding valley made flood-control an ongoing challenge, was there any difficulty, and that merely during seasons of heavy rain.

And the provinces along the Glayge were tame as well: lush green farming country, interrupted by great urban centers. Valentine stared into the distance, narrowing his eyes against the brightness of the morning light and searching for the gray bulk of Castle Mount somewhere ahead; but, immense as it was, not even the Mount could be seen from two thousand miles away.

The first important city upriver from Pendiwane was Makroprosopos, famed for its weavers and artists. As Valentine’s ship approached, he saw that the waterfront of Makroprosopos was bedecked with mammoth Coronal-ensigns, probably hastily woven, and even more were still being hung.

Sleet said thoughtfully, "Do those flags mean defiant expression of loyalty to the dark Coronal, I wonder, or capitulation to your claim?"

"Surely they pay homage to you, my lord," Carabella said. "They know you’re advancing up the river — therefore they put out flags to welcome you!"

Valentine shook his head. "I think these folk are merely being cautious. If things go badly for me on Castle Mount, they can always claim that those were ensigns of loyalty to the other. And if he is the one who falls, they can say they were second only to Pendiwane in recognizing me. I think we ought not to allow them the luxury of such ambiguities. Asenhart?"

"My lord?"

"Take us to harbor at Makroprosopos."

For Valentine it was something of a gamble. There was no real need to land here, and the last thing he wanted was a battle at some irrelevant city far from the Mount. But to test the effectiveness of his strategy was important.

That test was passed almost at once. He heard the cheering when he was still far from shore: "Long life to Lord Valentine! Long life to the Coronal!"

The Mayor of Makroprosopos came scurrying to the pier to greet him, bearing gifts, great generous bales of his city’s finest fabrics. He fell all over himself bowing and scraping, and was pleased to arrange a levy of eight thousand of his citizens to join the army of restoration.

"What is happening?" Carabella asked quietly. "Will they accept anyone as Coronal who claims the throne loudly enough and waves a few energy-throwers around?"

Valentine shrugged. "These are peaceful folk, comfortable, luxury-loving, timid. They’ve known only prosperity for thousands of years, and they want nothing but thousands more of it. The idea of armed resistance is foreign to them, so they yield quickly when we come sailing in."

"Aye," said Sleet, "and if the Barjazid comes here next week, they’ll bow down just as willingly to him."

"Perhaps. Perhaps. But I’m gaining momentum. As these cities join me, others farther up will fear to hold back their allegiance. Let it come to be a stampede, eh?"

Sleet scowled. "All the same, what you’re doing now, someone else can do another time, and I don’t like it. What if a red-haired Lord Valentine appears next year, and says he’s the true Coronal? What if some Liiman shows up, insisting that everyone kneel to him, that the rivals are mere sorcerers? This world will dissolve into madness."

"There is only one anointed Coronal," said Valentine calmly, "and the people of these cities, whatever their motives, are simply bowing to the will of the Divine. Once I’ve returned to Castle Mount there’ll be no further usurpers and no further pretenders, I promise you that!"

Yet privately he recognized the wisdom of what Sleet had said. How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it. Now Dominin Barjazid had shown that treachery could undo good will, and Valentine was discovering — thus far — that intimidation could counter treachery. But would Majipoor ever be the same again, Valentine wondered, when all this conflict was ended?

—7—

AFTER MAKROPROSOPOS was Apocrune, and then Stangard Falls, and Nimivan, Threiz, South Gayles, and Mitripond. All of these cities, with some fifty million people among them, lost no time in accepting the sovereignty of the fair-haired Lord Valentine.

It was as Valentine had expected. These river-dwellers lacked the taste for warfare, and no one city cared to make a stand in battle for the sake of determining which of the rivals might be the true Coronal. Now that Pendiwane and Makroprosopos had yielded, the rest were eagerly falling into line; but these victories were trivial, he knew, for the river-cities would change allegiance again just as readily if they saw the tides of fortune swinging toward the darker overlord. Legitimacy, anointedness, the will of the Divine, all these things meant far less in the real world than one raised in the courts of Castle Mount might believe.

Still, better to have the nominal support of the river-cities than to have them scoff at his claim. At each, he decreed a new troop-levy — but a minor one, only a thousand per city, for his army was growing too large too soon, and he feared unwieldiness. He wished he knew what Dominin Barjazid thought of the events along the Glayge. Did he cower in the Castle, fearing that all the billions of Majipoor were marching angrily toward him? Or was he only biding his time, preparing his inner line of defense, ready to bring the entire realm down in chaos before he yielded possession of the Mount?

The river-journey continued.

Now the land was rising steeply. They were on the fringes of the great plateau, where the planet swelled and puckered into its mighty upjutting limb, and there were days when the Glayge seemed to rise before them like a vertical wall of water.

This now was familiar territory to Valentine, for in his youth on the Mount he had gone often to the headwaters of each of the Six Rivers, hunting and fishing with Voriax or Elidath or merely escaping a bit from the complexities of his education. His memory was nearly totally restored to him, the healing process having continued steadily ever since his stay on the Isle, and the sight of these well-known places sharpened and brightened his images of that past which Dominin Barjazid had tried to snatch from him. In the city of Jerrik, here in the narrower reaches of the upper Glayge, Valentine had gambled all night with an old Vroon not much unlike Autifon Deliamber, though he remembered him as less dwarfish, and in that endless rolling of the dice he had lost his purse, his sword, his mount, his title of nobility, and all his lands except one small bit of swamp, and then had won it all back before dawn — though he always suspected his companion had prudently chosen to reverse his flow of success rather than try to make good his winnings. It had been a useful lesson, at any rate. And at Ghiseldorn, where people dwelled in tents of black felt, he and Voriax had enjoyed a night of pleasure with a dark-haired witch at least thirty years old, who had awed them in the morning by casting their futures with pingla-seeds and proclaiming that they both were destined to be kings. Voriax had been greatly troubled by that prophecy, Valentine recalled, for it seemed to say that they would rule jointly as Coronal, in the way that they had jointly embraced the witch, and that was unheard of in the history of Majipoor. It had not occurred to either of them that she was saying that Valentine would be the successor of Voriax. And in Amblemorn, the most southwesterly of the Fifty Cities, an even younger Valentine had fallen heavily while racing through the forest of pygmy trees with Elidath of Morvole, and had cracked the big bone in his left leg with frightful pain, so that the jagged end stuck through the skin, and Elidath, though half sick with shock himself, had to adjust the fracture before they could go for help. Even after there had been a slight limp in that leg — but leg and limp as well, Valentine thought with some strange delight, now belonged to Dominin Barjazid, and this body they had given him was whole and flawless.

All those cities, and a good many more, surrendered to him as he arrived at them. Some fifty thousand troops now followed his banner, here at the edge of Castle Mount.

Amblemorn was as far as the army could travel by water. The river here became a maze of tributaries, shallow of channel and impossibly steep of grade. Valentine had sent Ermanar and ten thousand warriors ahead to arrange for land-vehicles. So potent now was the gathering force of Valentine’s name that Ermanar, without opposition, had been able to requisition virtually every floater-car in three provinces, and an ocean of vehicles waited in Amblemorn by the time the main body of troops arrived.

Commanding an army so large was no longer a task Valentine alone could handle. His orders descended through Ermanar, his field marshal, to five high officers, each of whom was given charge of a division: Carabella, Sleet, Zalzan Kavol, Lisamon Hultin, and Asenhart. Deliamber was ever at Valentine’s side with advice; and Shanamir, now not at all boyish, but much toughened and grown since his days herding mounts in Falkynkip, served as chief liaison officer, keeping communications channels open.

Three days were needed to complete the mobilization. "We are ready to begin moving, my lord," Shanamir reported. "Shall I give the order?"

Valentine nodded. "Tell the first column to get going. We’ll be past Bimbak by noon, if we start now."

"Yes, sir."

"And — Shanamir?"

"Sir?"

"I know this is war, but you don’t have to look so serious all the time. Eh?"

"Do I look too serious, my lord?" Shanamir reddened. "But this is a serious matter! This is the soil of Castle Mount beneath our feet!" Simply saying that seemed to awe him, this farmboy from far-off Falkynkip.

Valentine understood how he must feel. Zimroel seemed a million miles away.

He smiled and said, "Tell me, Shanamir, do I have it right? A hundred weights make a crown, ten crowns make a royal, and the price of these sausages is—"

Shanamir looked puzzled; then he smirked and fought to hold back laughter, and finally let the laughter come. "My lord!" he cried, tears at the edge of his eyes.

"Remember, there in Pidruid? When I would have bought sausages with a fifty-royal piece? Remember when you thought I was a simpleton? ‘Easy of mind,’ that’s the phrase you used. Easy of mind. I suppose I was a simpleton, those first days in Pidruid."

"A long time ago, my lord."

"Indeed. And perhaps I’m a simpleton still, clambering up Castle Mount like this to try to snatch back that grinding, wearying job of governing. But perhaps not. I hope not, Shanamir. Remember to smile more often, that’s all. Tell the first column to start moving out."

The boy ran off. Valentine watched him go. So far away, Pidruid, so remote in time and space, a million miles, a million years. So it seemed. And yet it was only a year and some months ago that he had perched on that ledge of white stone on that hot sticky day, looking down into Pidruid and wondering what to do next. Shanamir, Sleet, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol! All those months of juggling in provincial arenas, and sleeping on straw mattresses in flea-infested country inns! What a wonderful time that had been, Valentine thought — how free, how light a life. Nothing more important to do than get hired in the next town down the road, and make sure that you didn’t drop your clubs on your foot. He had never been happier. How good it had been of Zalzan Kavol to take him into the troupe, how kind of Sleet and Carabella to train him in their art. A Coronal of Majipoor among them, and they never knew! Who among them could have imagined then that before they were much older they would be jugglers no longer, but rather generals, leading an army of liberation against Castle Mount?

The first column was moving now. The floater-cars were getting under way, forward up the endless vast slopes that lay between Amblemorn and the Castle.

The Fifty Cities of Castle Mount were distributed like raisins in a pudding, in roughly concentric circles radiating outward from the peak of the Castle. There were a dozen in the outermost ring — Amblemorn, Perimor, Morvole, Canzilaine, Bimbak East, Bimbak West, Furible, Deepenhow Vale, Normork, Kazkas, Stipool, and Dundilmir. These, the so-called Slope Cities, were centers of manufacturing and commerce, and the smallest of them, Deepenhow Vale, had a population of seven million. The Slope Cities, founded ten to twelve thousand years ago, tended to be archaic in design, with street plans that might once have been rational but had long since become congested and confused by random modification. Each had its special beauties, famed throughout the world. Valentine had not visited them all — in a lifetime on Castle Mount, there was not time enough to get to know all of the Fifty Cities — but he had seen a good many, Bimbak East and Bimbak West with their twin mile-high towers of lustrous crystalline brick, Furible and its fabled garden of stone birds, Canzilaine where statues talked, Dundilmir of the Fiery Valley. Between these cities were royal parks, preserves for flora and fauna, hunting zones, and sacred groves, everything broad and spacious, for there were thousands of square miles, room enough for an uncrowded and unhurried civilization to develop.

A hundred miles higher on the Mount lay the ring of nine Free Cities — Sikkal, Huyn, Bibiroon, Stee, Upper Sunbreak, Lower Sunbreak, Castlethorn, Gimkandale, and Vugel. There was debate among scholars as to the origin of the term Free Cities, for no city on Majipoor was more free, or less, than any other; but the most widely accepted notion was that somewhere around the reign of Lord Stiamot these nine had been exempted from a tax levied on the others, in recompense for special favors rendered the Coronal. To this day the Free Cities were known to claim such exemptions, often with success. Of the Free Cities the largest was Stee on the river of the same name, with thirty million people — that is, a city the size of Ni-moya, and, according to rumor, even more grand. Valentine found it hard to conceive a place that so much as equaled Ni-moya in splendor; but he had never managed to visit Stee in his years on Castle Mount, and would pass nowhere near it now, for it lay on the far side entirely.

Higher yet were the eleven Guardian Cities — Sterinmor, Kowani, Greet, Minimool, Strave, Hoikmar, Ertsud Grand, Rennosk, Fa, Sigla Lower, and Sigla Higher. All of these were large, seven to thirteen million people. Because the circumference of the Mount was not as great at their altitude, the Guardian Cities were closer together than those below, and it was thought that in another few centuries they might form a continuous band of urban occupation encircling the Mount’s middle reaches.

Within that band lay the nine Inner Cities — Gabell, Chi, Haplior, Khresm, Banglecode, Bombifale, Guand, Peritole, and Tentag — and the nine High Cities — Muldemar, Huine, Gossif, Tidias, Low Morpin, High Morpin, Sipermit, Frangior, and Halanx. These were the metropolises best known to Valentine from his youth. Halanx, a city of noble estates, was the place of his birth; Sipermit was where he had lived during the reign of Voriax, for it was close by the Castle; High Morpin was his favorite holiday resort, where he had often gone to play on the mirror-slides and to ride the juggernauts. So long ago, so long ago! Often now, as his invading force floated up the roadways of the Mount, he looked into the sun-dappled distance, into the cloud-shrouded heights, hoping for a glimpse of the high country, a quick view of Sipermit, of Halanx, of High Morpin somewhere far ahead.

But it was still too soon to expect such things. From Amblemorn the road took them between Bimbak East and Bimbak West, and then on a dogleg detour around the impossibly steep and jagged Normork Crest to Normork itself, of the celebrated stone outer wall built — so legend had it — in imitation of the great wall of Velalisier. Bimbak East welcomed Valentine as legitimate monarch and liberator. The reception at Bimbak West was distinctly less cordial, although there was no show of resistance: its people plainly had not made up their minds where their advantage lay in the strange struggle now unfolding. And at Normork the great Dekkeret Gate was closed and sealed, perhaps for the first time since it had been erected. That seemed unfriendly, but Valentine chose to interpret it as a declaration of neutrality, and passed Normork by without making any attempt to enter. The last thing he cared to do now was divert his energies by laying siege to an impregnable city. Easier by far, he thought, simply not to regard it as his enemy.

Beyond Normork the route crossed Tolingar Barrier, which was no barrier at all, but only an immense park, forty miles of manicured elegance for the amusement of the citizens of Kazkas, Stipool, and Dundilmir. Here it was as if every tree, every bush, had been clipped and wired and pruned into the most shapely of shapes. There was not a branch askew, not a limb out of proportion. If all the billion people who dwelled on Castle Mount had served as gardeners in Tolingar Barrier, they could not have achieved such perfection with round-the-clock toil. It had been accomplished, Valentine knew, by a program of controlled breeding, four thousand years and more in the past, beginning in the reign of Lord Havilbove and continuing through the reigns of three of his successors: these plants were self-shaping, self-pruning, unendingly monitoring themselves for symmetry of form. The secret of such horticultural wizardry had been lost.

And now the army of restoration was entering the level of the Free Cities.

It was possible here, at Bibiroon Sweep atop Tolingar Barrier, to look back down the slopes for a view that was still comprehensible, though already unimaginably mighty. Lord Havilbove’s wondrous park coiled like a tongue of green just below, curving off toward the east, and beyond it, mere gray dots, lay Dundilmir and Stipool, with just the finest suggestion of the secretive bulk of walled Normork visible at the side. Then there was the stupefying downward glide of the land toward Amblemorn and the sources of the Glayge. And, hazy as dream-fog on the horizon, the outlines, more likely than not painted by the imagination alone, of the river and its teeming cities, Nimivan, Mitripond, Threiz, South Gayles. Of, Makroprosopos and Pendiwane there was not even a hint, though Valentine saw the natives of those cities staring long and hard, and pointing with vehemence, telling one another that that hummock or this nub was their home.

Shanamir said, standing beside Valentine, "I imagined that you could see all the way to Pidruid from Castle Mount! But we can’t even see the Labyrinth. Is there a longer view from higher up?"

"No," Valentine said. "Clouds conceal everything below the Guardian Cities. Sometimes, up there, one can forget that the rest of Majipoor exists."

"Is it very cold up there?" the boy asked.

"Cold? No, not cold at all. As mild as it is here. Milder, even. A perpetual springtime. The air is soft and easy, and flowers always bloom."

"But it reaches so far into the sky! The mountains of the Khyntor Marches are not nearly so high as this — they’re not even a patch on Castle Mount — and yet I’ve been told that snow falls on the March peaks, and sometimes remains all summer long. It should be black as night at the Castle, Valentine, and cold, cold as death!"

"No," Valentine said. "The machines of the ancients create an unending springtime. They have roots deep in the Mount, and suck out energy — I have no idea how — and transform it into warmth, light, good sweet air. I’ve seen the machines, in the depths of the Castle, huge things of metal, enough metal to build a city with, and giant pumps, and enormous brass tubes and pipes—"

"When will we be there, Valentine? Are we close?"

Valentine shook his head. "Not even halfway."

—8—

THE MOST DIRECT ROUTE upward through the Free Cities lay between Bibiroon and Upper Sunbreak. That was a wide, gently rising shoulder of the Mount, where the slope was so easy that little time would be wasted on switchbacks. As they neared Bibiroon, Valentine learned from Gorzval the Skandar, who was serving as quartermaster, that the army was running low on fresh fruit and meat. It seemed wisest to reprovision at this level, before tackling the ascent to the Guardian Cities.

Bibiroon was a city of twelve million, arrayed in spectacular fashion along a hundred-mile ridge that seemed to hang suspended over the face of the Mount. There was only one approach to it — from the Upper Sunbreak side, through a gorge so steep and narrow that a hundred warriors could defend it against a million. Not at all to Valentine’s surprise, the gorge was occupied when he came to it, and by somewhat more than a hundred warriors.

Ermanar and Deliamber went forward to parley. A short while later they returned with the news that Duke Heitluig of Chorg, of whose province Bibiroon was the capital, was in command of the troops in the gorge and was willing to speak with Lord Valentine.

Carabella said, "Who is this Heitluig? Do you know him?"

Valentine nodded. "Distantly. He belongs to the family of Tyeveras. I hope he holds no grudges against me."

"He could win much grace with Dominin Barjazid," said Sleet darkly, "by striking you down in this pass."

"And suffer for it in all his sleeping hours?" Valentine asked, laughing. "A drunkard he may be, but not a murderer, Sleet. He is a noble of the realm."

"As is Dominin Barjazid, my lord."

"Barjazid himself did not dare to slay me when he had the chance. Am I to expect assassins wherever I parley? Come: we waste time in this."

On foot Valentine went to the mouth of the gorge, accompanied by Ermanar, Asenhart, and Deliamber. The duke and three of his followers were waiting.

Heitluig was a broad-shouldered, powerful-looking man with thick, coarsely curling white hair and a florid, fleshy face. He stared intently at Valentine, as though searching the features of this fair-haired stranger for some hint of the presence of the soul of the true Coronal. Valentine saluted him as was fitting for a Coronal greeting a provincial duke, bland stare and outturned palm, and immediately Heitluig was in difficulties, obviously unsure of the proper form of response. He said after a moment, "The report is that you are Lord Valentine, changed by witchery. If that is so, I bid you welcome, my lord."

"Believe me, Heitluig, it is so."

"There have been sendings to that effect. And also contrary ones."

Valentine smiled. "The sending of the Lady are the trustworthy ones. Those of the King are worth about as much as you might expect, considering what his son has done. Have you had instructions from the Labyrinth?"

"That we are to recognize you, yes. But these are strange times. If I am to mistrust what I hear from the Castle, why should I give faith to orders out of the Labyrinth? They might be forgeries or deceptions."

"Here we have Ermanar, high servitor to your great-uncle the Pontifex. He is not here as my captive," said Valentine. "He can show you the Pontifical seals that give him authority."

The duke shrugged. His eyes continued to probe Valentine’s. "This is a mysterious thing, that a Coronal should be changed this way. If such a thing can be true, anything can be true. What is it you want in Bibiroon — my lord?"

"We need fruit and meat. We have hundreds of miles yet to go, and hungry soldiers are not the best kind."

With a twitch of his cheek, Heitluig said, "Surely you know you are at a Free City."

"I know that. But what of that?"

"The tradition is ancient, and perhaps forgotten by others. But we of the Free Cities hold that we are not required to provide goods for the government, beyond the legally specified taxes. The cost of provisions for an army the size of yours—"

" — will be borne entirely by the imperial treasury," said Valentine crisply. "We are asking nothing from Bibiroon that will cost Bibiroon as much as a five-weight piece."

"And the imperial treasury marches with you?"

Valentine let a flicker of anger show. "The imperial treasury resides at Castle Mount, as it has since Lord Stiamot’s day, and when I have reached it and have hurled down the usurper I’ll make full payment for what we purchase here. Or is the credit of the Coronal no longer acceptable in Bibiroon?"

"The credit of the Coronal still is, yes," said Heitluig carefully. "But there are doubts, my lord. We are thrifty people here, and great shame would come upon us if it developed that we had extended credit to — to one who made false claim upon us."

Valentine struggled for patience.

"You call me ‘my lord,’ and yet you talk of doubts."

"I am uncertain, yes. I admit that."

"Heitluig, come off and talk alone with me a moment."

"Eh?"

"Come off ten steps! Do you think I’ll slit your throat the moment you leave your bodyguard? I want to whisper something to you that you might not want me to say in front of others."

The duke, looking baffled and uneasy, nodded grudgingly and let Valentine lead him away. In a low voice Valentine said, "When you came to Castle Mount for my coronation, Heitluig, you sat at the table of the kin of the Pontifex, and you drank four or five flasks of Muldemar wine, do you remember? And when you were properly sozzled you stood up to dance, and tripped over the leg of your cousin Elzandir, and went sprawling on your face, and would have fought Elzandir on the spot if I had not put my arm around you and drawn you aside. Eh? Does any of that strike an echo in you? And would I know any of that if I were some upstart out of Zimroel trying to seize Lord Valentine’s Castle?"

Heitluig’s face was scarlet. "My lord—"

"Now you say it with some conviction!" Valentine clasped the duke warmly by the shoulder. "All right, Heitluig. Give me your aid, and when you come to the Castle to celebrate my restoration, you’ll have five flasks more of good Muldemar. And I hope you’ll be more temperate than the last time."

"My lord, how can I serve you?"

"I told you. We need fruit and fresh meat, and we’ll settle the bill when I’m Coronal again."

"So be it. But will you be Coronal?"

"What do you mean?"

"The army that waits above is not a small one, my lord. Lord Valentine — I mean, he who claims to be Lord Valentine — is summoning citizens by the hundreds of thousands to the defense of the Castle."

Valentine frowned. "And where is this army assembling?"

"Between Ertsud Grand and Bombifale. He’s drawing on all the Guardian Cities and every city above them. Rivers of blood will run down the Mount, my lord."

Valentine turned away and closed his eyes a moment. Pain and dismay lashed his spirit. It was inevitable, it was not in the least surprising, it was entirely as he had expected from the start. Dominin Barjazid would allow him to march freely through the lower slopes, then would make a fierce defense in the upper reaches, using against him his own royal bodyguard, the knights of high birth with whom he had been reared. In the front lines against him — Stasilaine, Tunigorn, Mirigant his cousin, Elidath, Divvis his brother’s son—

For an instant Valentine’s resolve wavered once more. Was it worth the turmoil, the bloodshed, the agony of his people, to make himself Coronal a second time? Perhaps it had been the will of the Divine that he be cast down. If he thwarted that will, perhaps, he would accomplish only some terrible cataclysm on the plains above Ertsud Grand, and leave scars on the souls of all people, that would fill his nights with dark accusing dreams of lacerating guilt and make his name accursed forever.

He could turn back now, he could resign from the confrontation with the forces of the Barjazid, he could accept the verdict of destiny, he could — No.

This was a struggle he had fought and won within himself before, and he would not fight it again. A false Coronal, mean and petty and dangerous, held the highest seat of the land, and ruled rashly and illegitimately. This must not be allowed to remain the case. Nothing else mattered.

"My lord?" Heitluig said.

Valentine looked back at the duke. "The idea of war makes me ache, Heitluig."

"There is no one who relishes it, my lord."

"Yet a time comes when war must happen, lest even worse things befall. I think we are at such a time now."

"So it seems."

"Do you accept me as Coronal, Heitluig?"

"No pretender would have known of my drunkenness at the coronation, I think."

"And will you fight beside me above Ertsud Grand?"

Heitluig regarded him steadily. "Of course, my lord. How many troops of Bibiroon will you require?"

"Say, five thousand. I want no enormous army up there — merely a loyal and brave one."

"Five thousand warriors are yours, my lord. More if you ask for them."

"Five thousand will do, Heitluig, and I thank you for your faith in me. Now let’s see about the fresh fruit and meat!"

—9—

THE STAY AT BIBIROON was brief, just long enough for Heitluig to gather his forces and supply Valentine with the necessary provisions, and then it was on upward, upward, upward. Valentine rode in the vanguard, with his dear friends of Pidruid close at his side. It delighted him to see the look of awe and wonder in their eyes, to see Shanamir’s face aglow with excitement, to hear Carabella’s little indrawn gasp of ecstasy, to notice even gruff Zalzan Kavol muttering and rumbling in astonishment, as the splendors of Castle Mount unrolled before them.

And he — how radiant he felt at the thought of coming home!

The higher they went, the sweeter and more pure became the air, for they were drawing ever closer to the great engines that sustained the eternal springtime of the Mount. Soon the outlying districts belonging to the Guardian Cities were in view.

"So much—" Shanamir murmured in a thickened voice. "So grand a sight—"

Here the Mount was a great gray shield of granite that rolled heavenward in a gentle but inexorable sweep, disappearing into the white billow of clouds that cloaked the upper slopes. The sky was a dazzling electric blue, deeper in tone than in Majipoor’s lowlands. Valentine remembered that sky, how he had loved it, how he had loathed going down into the ordinary world of ordinary colors beyond the Mount. His breast tightened at the sight of it now. Every hill and ridge seemed outlined with a sparkling halo of mysterious brightness. The dust itself, blowing along the edge of the highway, appeared to glitter and shine. Satellite towns and lesser cities could be seen dotting the distant landscape, shimmering like places of awesome magic, and, high above, several of the major urban centers now came in view. Ertsud Grand lay straight ahead, its huge black towers just visible on the horizon, and to the east was a darkness that probably was the city of Minimool; Hoikmar, famed for its quiet canals and byways, could barely be perceived at the extreme westernmost edge of the landscape.

Valentine blinked away the unexpected and troublesome moistness that suddenly was welling in his eyes. He tapped Carabella’s pocket-harp and said, "Sing to me."

She smiled and took up the little harp. "We sang this in Til-omon, where Castle Mount was only a storybook place, a romantic dream—"

She halted, strummed a quick fretful discord, put down the harp. She turned her face from him.

"What is it, love?" Valentine asked.

Carabella shook her head.

"Nothing. I forget the words."

"Carabella?"

"It’s nothing, I said!"

"Please—"

She looked toward him, biting at her lip, her eyes tear-flooded. "It’s so wondrous here, Valentine," she whispered. "And so strange— so frightening—"

"Wondrous, yes. Frightening, no."

"It’s beautiful, I know. And bigger than I ever imagined, all these cities, these mountains that are part of the big mountain, everything marvelous. But— but— "

"Tell me."

"You’re coming home, Valentine! All your friends, your family, your — your lovers, I suppose — Once we’ve won the war, you’ll have them around you, they’ll sweep you away for banquets and celebrations, and—" She paused. "I promised myself I would not say any of this."

"Say it."

"My lord—"

"Not so formal, Carabella." He took her hands. Shanamir and Zalzan Kavol, he noticed, had moved to another part of the floater-car and sat with their backs to them.

She said in a rush of words, "My lord, what happens to the little juggler-girl from Til-omon when you are back among the princes and ladies of Castle Mount?"

"Have I given you reason to think I’ll abandon you?"

"No, my lord. But—"

"Call me Valentine, if you will. But what?"

Her cheeks colored. She drew her hand from him and ran it tensely through her dark glossy hair. "Your Duke Heitluig, yesterday, saw us together, saw your arm around me — Valentine, you didn’t notice his smile! As though I were some pretty toy of yours, some pet, some little trinket to be discarded when the time comes."

"You read too much into Heitluig’s smile, I think," said Valentine slowly, although he had noticed it too, and had been troubled by it. To Heitluig, he knew, and to others of his rank, Carabella would seem only an upstart concubine of unimaginable lower-class origins, to be treated at best with scorn. In his former life on Castle Mount such distinctions of class had been an unchallengeable assumption of the nature of things; but he had been down from the Mount a long time, and saw things differently these days. Carabella’s fears were real. Yet it was a problem that could be conquered only in its proper moment. There were other conquests to deal with first. He said gently, "Heitluig is too fond of wine, and his soul is a coarse one. Ignore him. You will find a place among the high ones of the Castle, and no one will dare slight you when I am Coronal again. Come now, finish the song."

"You love me, Valentine?"

"I love you, yes. But I love you less when your eyes are red and puffy, Carabella."

She snorted. "That’s the sort of thing one would say to a child! Do you see me as a child, then?"

With a shrug Valentine replied, "I see you as a woman, and a shrewd and lovely one. But what am I supposed to answer, when you ask me if I love you?"

"That you love me. And nothing more by way of decoration."

"I’m sorry, then. I must rehearse these things more carefully. Will you sing again?"

"If you wish," she said, and took up her pocket-harp.

All morning they rode higher, into the open spaces beyond the Free Cities. Valentine chose the Pinitor Highway, that wound between Ertsud Grand and Hoikmar through an empty countryside of rocky plateaus broken only by sparse copses of ghazan-trees, with stout ashen-colored trunks and gnarled convoluted arms — trees that lived ten thousand years and made a soft sighing sound when their time was come. This was stark and silent land, where Valentine and his forces could gather their souls for the effort that lay before them.

All this while their climb went unopposed. "They will not try to stop you," Heitluig said, "until you are above the Guardian Cities. The world is narrower up there. The land is folded and wrinkled. There will be places to trap you."

"There will be room enough," said Valentine.

In a barren valley rimmed with jagged spires, beyond which the city of Ertsud Grand could be seen only some twenty miles to the east, he drew his army to a halt and conferred with his commanders. Scouts had already gone forward to inspect the enemy force, bringing back news that weighed on Valentine like a leaden cloak: an immense army, they reported, a sea of warriors filling the broad flat plain that occupied hundreds of square miles below the Inner City of Bombifale. Most were foot-soldiers, but there were floater-cars gathered as well, and a regiment of mounted troops, and a corps of great thundering monitors, at least ten times as many of the massive tanklike war-beasts as had been camped in wait for them by the banks of the Glayge. But he let no hint of disheartenment show. "We are outnumbered twenty to one," Valentine said. "I find that encouraging. Too bad there aren’t even more of them — but an army that size ought to be unwieldy enough to make life easy for us." He tapped the chart before him. "They camp here, on Bombifale Plain, and surely they can see that we are marching straight toward that plain. They’ll expect us to attempt to make our ascent via the Peritole Pass, west of the plain, and that will have the heaviest guard. We will indeed go toward Peritole Pass." Valentine heard a gasp of dismay from Heitluig, and Ermanar looked at him with sudden pained surprise. Untroubled, Valentine went on, "And as we do, they’ll send reinforcements in that direction. Once they’ve begun to move into the pass it should be difficult for them to regroup and redirect themselves. As they start into motion, we’ll swing back toward the plain, ride straight into the heart of their camp, and go through them and on to Bombifale itself. Above Bombifale is the High Morpin road that will take us unhindered to the Castle. Are there questions?"

Ermanar said, "What if they have a second army waiting for us between Bombifale and High Morpin?"

"Ask me that again," Valentine replied, "when we get beyond Bombifale. Any other questions?" He glanced around. No one spoke. "Good. Onward, then!"

Another day and the terrain grew more fertile, as they entered the great green apron that encircled the Inner Cities. They were in the cloud zone now, cool and moist, where the sun could be seen, but only indistinctly, through the coiling strands of mist that never lifted. In this humid region plants that, below, were merely knee-high grew to giant size, with leaves like platters and stems like tree-trunks, and everything glittered with a coating of shining droplets of water.

The landscape here was a broken one, with steep-sided mountain ranges rising abruptly out of deep-cut valleys, and roads that wound precariously around fierce conical peaks. Choices of route became fewer: to the west were the Bangle-code Pinnacles, a region of impassable fanglike mountains that had scarcely ever been explored, to the east was the wide and easy slope of Bombifale Plain, and straight ahead, bordered on both sides by sheer rock walls, was the series of gigantic natural steps known as Peritole Pass, where — unless Valentine entirely missed his guess — the usurper’s finest troops lay in wait.

In an unhurried way Valentine led his forces toward the pass. Four hours forward, camp for two, travel five hours more, make camp for the night, late start in the morning. In the exhilarating air of Castle Mount it would have been easy enough to travel much faster. But beyond doubt the enemy was watching his progress from on high, and he wanted to give them plenty of time to observe his route and take the necessary countermeasures.

The next day he stepped up the pace, for now the first of the huge deep steps of the pass was in sight. Deliamber, sending forth his spirit through wizardry, returned with word that the defending army was indeed in possession of the pass, and that secondary troops were streaming westward out of Bombifale Plain to give support.

Valentine smiled. "It won’t be long now. They’re falling into our hands."

Two hours before twilight he gave the order to make camp, at a pleasant meadow beside a cold, plunging stream. The wagons were drawn up in defensive formation, foragers went out to collect timber for fires, the quartermasters began distributing dinner — and, as night came on, word suddenly circulated through camp that they were to pull up and take to the road again, leaving all fires burning and many of the wagons still in formation.

Valentine felt excitement rising thunderously within him. He saw a renewed gleam in Carabella’s eyes, and Sleet’s old scar stood out angrily against his cheek as his heart pumped faster. And there was Shanamir, going this way and that but never foolishly, handling many small responsibilities and large ones with sober-faced expertness, at once comic and admirable. These were unforgettable hours, taut with the potential of great events about to be born.

Carabella said, "In the old days on the Mount, you must have studied the art of war deeply, to have devised a maneuver such as this."

With a laugh Valentine said, "Art of war? Whatever art of war was once known on Majipoor was forgotten before Lord Stiamot was a hundred years dead. I don’t know a thing about war, Carabella."

"But how—"

"Guesswork. Luck. A gigantic kind of juggle. I’m making it up as I go along." He winked. "But don’t tell the others that. Let them think their general’s a genius, and they may make him into one!"

In the cloud-shrouded sky no stars could be seen and the light of the moon was only the faintest of reddish glows. Valentine’s army moved along the road to Bombifale Plain by the illumination of light-globes at their dimmest intensity, and Deliamber sat beside Valentine and Ermanar in deep trance, roving forward to search for barriers and obstacles ahead. Valentine was silent, still, feeling strangely calm. This was indeed a sort of gigantic juggle, he thought. And now, as he had done so many times with the troupe, he was moving toward that quiet place at the center of his consciousness, where he could process the information of a constantly changing pattern of events without being in any overt way aware of processing, or of information, or even of events: everything done in its proper time, with serene awareness of the only effective sequence of things.

It was an hour before dawn when they reached the place where the road swung uphill toward the entrance to the plain. Again Valentine summoned his commanders.

"Three things only," he told them. "Stay in tight formation. Take no lives needlessly. Keep pressing forward." He went to each of them in turn with a word, a handclasp, a smile. "We’ll have lunch today in Bombifale," he said. "And dinner tomorrow night in Lord Valentine’s Castle, I promise you!"

—10—

THIS WAS THE MOMENT Valentine had dreaded for months, when he must lead citizens of Majipoor into war against citizens of Majipoor, when he must stake the blood of the companions of his boyhood. Yet now that the moment was at hand he felt firm and quiet of spirit.

By the gray light of dawn the invading army rolled out across the rim of the plain, and in the mists of morning Valentine had his first glimpse of the legions that confronted him. The plain seemed to be filled with black tents. Soldiers were everywhere, vehicles, mounts, mollitors — a confused and chaotic tide of humanity.

Valentine’s forces were arrayed in the form of a wedge, with his bravest and most dedicated followers in the lead wagons of the phalanx, Duke Heitluig’s troops forming the middle body of the army, and the thousands of unwarlike militia from Pendiwane, Makroprosopos, and the other cities of the Glayge forming a rear guard more significant for its mass than for its prowess. All the races of Majipoor were represented in the forces of liberation — a platoon of Skandars, a detachment of Vroons, a whole horde of burning-eyed Liimen, a great many Hjorts and Ghayrogs, even a small elite corps of Su-Suheris. Valentine himself rode at one of the triple points of the wedge’s front face, but not the central point: Ermanar was there, prepared to bear the brunt of the usurper’s counteroffensive. Valentine’s car was on the right wing, Asenhart’s on the left, and the columns led by Sleet, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol, and Lisamon Hultin just to their rear.

"Now!" Valentine cried, and the battle was begun.

Ermanar’s car plunged forward, horns blowing, lights flashing. A moment later Valentine followed, and, looking across to the far side of the battlefield, he saw Asenhart keeping pace. In tight formation they charged into the plain, and at once the huge mass of defenders was thrown into disarray. The front line of the usurper’s forces collapsed with startling abruptness, almost as though it were a deliberate strategy. Panicky troops ran this way and that, colliding, entangling, scrambling for weapons or merely heading for safety. The great open space of the plain became an ocean of desperate surging figures, without leadership, without plan. Onward through them the invading phalanx rode. There was little exchange of fire; an occasional energy-bolt cast its lurid glare over the landscape, but chiefly the enemy seemed too bewildered for any coherent pattern of defense, and the attacking wedge, cutting forward at will, had no need to take lives.

Deliamber, at Valentine’s side, said quietly, "They are strung out across an enormous front, a hundred miles or more. It will take them time to concentrate their strength. But after the first panic they will regroup, and things will become less easy for us."

Indeed that was happening already.

The inexperienced citizen-militia that Dominin Barjazid had levied out of the Guardian Cities might be in disarray, but the nucleus of the defending army consisted of knights of Castle Mount, trained in warlike games if not in the techniques of war itself, and they were rallying now, closing in on all sides around the small wedge of invaders that had thrust deep among them. A platoon of mollitors had somehow been rounded up and was advancing on Asenhart’s flank, jaws snapping, huge clawed limbs seeking to do harm. On the other side a cavalry detachment had found its mounts and was striving to get into some kind of formation; and Ermanar had run into a steady barrage of fire from energy-throwers.

"Hold your formation!" Valentine cried. "Keep moving forward!"

They were still making progress, but the pace was slowing perceptibly. If at the outset Valentine’s forces had cut through the enemy like a hot blade through butter, now it was more like trying to push through a wall of thick mud. Many of the vehicles were surrounded and some were altogether stopped. Valentine had a glimpse of Lisamon Hultin on foot, striding through a mob of defenders and hurling them like twigs to left and right. Three gigantic Skandars were out on the field also — they could only be Zalzan Kavol and his brothers — doing terrible carnage with their many arms, each wielding a weapon of some sort.

Then Valentine’s own vehicle was engulfed, but his driver pulled it into reverse and swung it sharply around, knocking the enemy soldiers aside. Onward — onward—

There were bodies everywhere. It had been folly for Valentine to hope that the reconquest of the Mount could be achieved bloodlessly. Already it seemed hundreds must be dead, thousands injured. He scowled and aimed his own energy-thrower at a tall hard-faced man who was bearing down on his car, and sent him sprawling. Valentine blinked as the air crackled about him in the wake of his own energy discharge, and fired again, again, again.

"Valentine! Lord Valentine!"

The cry was universal. But it was coming from the throats of warriors on both sides of the fray, and each side had its own Lord Valentine in mind.

Now the advance seemed altogether blocked. The tide had definitely shifted; the defenders were launching a counterattack. It was as though they had not quite been ready for the first onslaught, and had merely allowed Valentine’s army to come crashing through; but now they were regrouping, gathering strength, adopting a semblance of strategy.

"They appear to have new leadership, my lord," Ermanar reported. "The general who guides them now holds powerful control, and spurs them fiercely toward us."

A line of mollitors had formed, leading the counterthrust with the usurper’s troops coming in great numbers behind them. But the dull-witted unruly beasts were causing more difficulty from sheer bulk than with their claws and jaws: simply getting past their mammoth humpbacked forms was a challenge. Many of Valentine’s officers were out of their vehicles now — he caught sight again of Lisamon Hultin, and of Sleet, and Carabella fighting furiously, all with knots of their own troops doing their best to protect them. Valentine himself would have left the wagon, but Deliamber ordered him to stay off the field. "Your person is sacred and indispensable," the Vroon said brusquely. "The hand-to-hand warriors will have to make do without you."

"But—"

"It is essential."

Valentine scowled. He saw the logic of what Deliamber said, but he despised it. Nevertheless he yielded.

"Forward!" he roared in frustration into the dark ivory horn of his field communicator.

But they could not go forward. Clouds of defending warriors were coming now from all sides, driving Valentine’s forces back. The new strength of the usurper’s army appeared to be centered not far from Valentine, just beyond a rise in the plain, and radiated outward from there in bands of virtually visible power. Yes, some new general, Valentine thought, some powerful field commander providing inspiration and strength, rallying the troops that had been so dispirited. As I should be doing, he thought, down on the field among them. As I should be doing.

Ermanar’s voice came to him. "My lord, do you see that low knoll to your right? Beyond it is the enemy command post — their general is there, in the midst of the battle."

"I want to look at him," Valentine said, signaling his driver to move to higher ground.

"My lord," Ermanar went on, "we must concentrate our attack there, and remove him before he gains greater advantage."

"Certainly," Valentine murmured remotely. He stared, narrowing his eyes. The scene seemed all confusion down there. But gradually he discerned a form to the flow. Yes, that must be he. A tall man, taller than Valentine, with a strong wide-mouthed face, piercing dark eyes, a heavy shock of glossy black hair braided in back. He looked oddly familiar — so very familiar, beyond question familiar, one whom Valentine had known, and known well, in his days on Castle Mount, but his mind was so muddled by the chaos of the battle that for a moment he found it hard to reach into his store of renewed memory and identify—

Yes. Of course.

Elidath of Morvole.

How could he have forgotten, even for an instant, even amidst all this madness, the companion of his youth, Elidath, at times closer even to him than his brother Voriax, Elidath the dearest of all his friends, the sharer of so many of his boldest early exploits, the nearest to him in abilities and temperament, Elidath whom all considered, even Valentine himself, to be next in line to be Coronal—

Elidath leading the enemy army. Elidath the dangerous general who must be removed.

"My lord?" Ermanar said. "We await your instructions, my lord."

Valentine faltered. "Surround him," he replied. "Neutralize him. Take him prisoner, if you can."

"We could center our fire on—"

"He is to be unharmed," Valentine ordered bluntly.

"My lord—"

"Unharmed, I said."

"Yes, my lord." But there was not much conviction in Ermanar’s reply. To Ermanar, Valentine knew, an enemy was merely an enemy, and this general would do least damage if he were quickly slain. But Elidath — !

In tension and distress Valentine watched as Ermanar swung his forces about and guided them toward Elidath’s camp. Simple enough to order that Elidath not be harmed; but how could that be controlled, in the heat of battle? This was what Valentine had feared most of all, that some beloved companion of his would lead the opposing troops — but to know that it was Elidath, that Elidath was in jeopardy on the field, that Elidath must fall if the army of liberation was to go forward — what agony that was!

Valentine stood up. Deliamber said, "You must not—"

"I must," he said, and rushed from the wagon before the Vroon could place some wizardry on him.

Out here in the midst of things all was incomprehensible: figures rushing to and fro, enemies indistinguishable from friends, all noise, tumult, shouting, alarms, dust, and insanity. The patterns of battle that Valentine had been able to discern from his floater-car were not visible here. He thought he perceived Ermanar’s troops closing in on one side, and a muddied and chaotic struggle going on somewhere in the direction of Elidath’s camp.

"My lord," Shanamir called to him, "you should not be in plain view! You—"

Valentine waved him off and moved toward the thickest part of the battle.

The tide had shifted again, so it seemed, with Ermanar’s concerted attack on Elidath’s camp. The invaders were breaking through and once more casting the enemy into disorder. They were falling back, knights and citizens alike, running in random circles, trying to flee the merciless oncoming attackers, while somewhere far ahead a knot of defenders held firm round Elidath, a single sturdy rock in the raging torrent.

Let Elidath not be harmed, Valentine prayed. Let him be taken, and taken swiftly, but let him not be harmed.

He pressed forward, all but unnoticed on the battlefield. Once again victory seemed to be within his grasp: but at too high a cost, much too high, if bought with the death of Elidath.

Valentine saw Lisamon Hultin and Khun of Kianimot just ahead, side by side, hacking a path through which the others could follow, and they were driving all before them. Khun was laughing, as if he had waited all his life for this moment of fierce commitment.

Then an enemy bolt struck the blue-skinned alien in the chest. Khun staggered and swung around. Lisamon Hultin, seeing him beginning to fall, caught him and steadied him, and lowered him gently to the ground.

"Khun!" Valentine cried, and rushed toward him. Even from twenty yards away he could see that the alien had been terribly wounded. Khun was gasping; his lean, sharp-featured face looked mottled, almost gray; his eyes were dull. At the sight of Valentine he brightened a little and tried to sit up.

"My lord," the giantess said, "this is no place for you."

He ignored her and bent to the alien. "Khun? Khun?" he whispered urgently.

"It’s all right, my lord. I knew — there was a reason — why I had come to your world—"

"Khun!"

"Too bad — I’ll miss the victory banquet—"

Helpless, Valentine grasped the alien’s sharp-boned shoulders and held him, but Khun’s life slipped swiftly and quietly away. His long strange journey was at its end. He had found purpose at last, and peace.

Valentine rose and looked about, perceiving the madness of the battlefield as though in a dream. A cordon of his people surrounded him, and someone — Sleet, he realized — was pulling at him, trying to get him to a safer place.

"No," Valentine muttered. "Let me fight—"

"Not out here, my lord. Would you share Khun’s fate? What of all of us, if you perish? The enemy troops are streaming toward us from Peritole Pass. Soon the fighting will grow even more furious. You should not be on the field."

Valentine understood that. Dominin Barjazid was nowhere on the scene, after all, and probably neither should he be. But how could he sit snug in a floater-car, when others were dying for him, when Khun, who was not even a creature of this world, had already given his life for him, when his beloved Elidath, just beyond that rise in the plain, was perhaps in grave peril from Valentine’s own troops? He swayed in indecision. Sleet, bleak-faced, released him, but only to summon Zalzan Kavol: the giant Skandar, swinging swords in three arms and wielding an energy-thrower with the fourth, was not far away. Valentine saw Sleet conferring sternly with him, and Zalzan Kavol, holding defenders at bay almost disdainfully, began to fight his way toward Valentine. In a moment, Valentine suspected, the Skandar might haul him forcibly, crowned Power or not, from the field.

"Wait," Valentine said. "The heir presumptive is in danger. I command you to follow me!"

Sleet and Zalzan Kavol looked baffled by the unfamiliar title.

"The heir presumptive?" Sleet repeated. "Who’s—"

"Come with me," Valentine said. "An order."

Zalzan Kavol rumbled, "Your safety, my lord, is—"

" — not the only important thing. Sleet, at my left! Zalzan Kavol, at my right!"

They were too bewildered to disobey. Valentine summoned Lisamon Hultin also; and, guarded by his friends, he moved rapidly over the rise toward the front line of the enemy.

"Elidath!" Valentine cried, bellowing it with all his strength.

His voice carried across half a league, so it seemed, and the sound of that mighty roar caused all action about him to cease for an instant. Past an avenue of motionless warriors Valentine looked toward Elidath, and as their eyes met he saw the dark-haired man pause, return to look, frown, shrug.

To Sleet and Zalzan Kavol Valentine shouted, "Capture that man! Bring him to me — unharmed!"

The instant of stasis ended; with redoubled intensity the tumult of battle resumed. Valentine’s forces swarmed once more toward the hard-pressed and yielding enemy, and for a second he caught sight of Elidath, surrounded by a shield of his own people, fiercely holding his ground. Then he could see no more, for everything became chaotic again. Someone was tugging at him — Sleet, perhaps? Carabella? — urging him again to return to the safety of his car, but he grunted and pulled himself free.

"Elidath of Morvole!" Valentine called. "Elidath, come to parley!"

"Who calls my name?" was the reply.

Again the surging mob opened between him and Elidath. Valentine stretched his arms toward the frowning figure and began to make answer. But words would be too slow, too clumsy, Valentine knew. Abruptly he dropped into the trance-state, putting all his strength of will into his mother’s silver circlet, and casting forth across the space that separated him from Elidath of Morvole the full intensity of his soul in a single compressed fraction of an instant of dream-images, dream-force—

—two young men, boys really, riding sleek fast mounts through a forest of stunted dwarfish trees—

—a thick twisted root rising like a serpent out of the ground across the path, a mount stumbling, a boy flung headlong—

—a terrible cracking sound, a white shaft of jagged bone jutting horridly through torn skin—

—the other boy reining in, riding back, whistling in astonishment and fright as he saw the extent of the injury—

Valentine could sustain the dream-pictures no longer. The moment of contact ended. Drained, exhausted, he slipped back into waking reality.

Elidath stared at him, bewildered. It was as though the two of them alone were on the battlefield, and all that was going on about them was mere noise and vapor.

"Yes," Valentine said. "You know me, Elidath. But not by this face I wear today."

"Valentine?"

"No other."

They moved toward each other. A ring of troops of both armies surrounded them, silent, mystified. When they were a few feet apart they halted and squared off uncertainly, as if they were about to launch into a duel. Elidath studied Valentine’s features in a stunned, astounded way.

"Can it be?" he asked finally. "Such a witchery, is it possible?"

"We rode together in the pygmy forest under Amble-morn," said Valentine. "I never felt such pain as on that day. Remember, when you moved the bone with your hands, putting it in its place, and you cried out as if the leg were your own?"

"How could you know such things?"

"And then the months I spent sitting and fuming, while you and Tunigorn and Stasilaine roamed the Mount without me? And the limp I had, that stayed with me even after I was healed?" Valentine laughed. "Dominin Barjazid stole that limp when he took my body from me! Who would have expected such a favor from the likes of him?"

Elidath seemed like one who walked in dreams. He shook his head, as though to rid it of cobwebs.

"This is witchery," he said.

"Yes. And I am Valentine!"

"Valentine is in the Castle. I saw him but yesterday, and he wished me well, and spoke of the old times, the pleasures we shared—"

"Stolen memories, Elidath. He fishes in my brain, and finds the old scenes embedded there. Have you noticed nothing strange about him, this past year?" Valentine’s eyes looked deep into Elidath’s and the other man flinched, as if fearing sorcery. "Have you not thought your Valentine oddly withdrawn and brooding and mysterious lately, Elidath?"

"Yes, but I thought — it was the cares of the throne that made him so."

"You noticed a difference, then! A change!"

"A slight one, yes. A certain coldness — a distance, a chill about him—"

"And still you deny me?"

Elidath stared. "Valentine?" he murmured, not yet believing. "You, really you, in that strange guise?"

"None other. And he up there in the Castle has deceived you, you and all the world."

"This is so strange."

"Come, give me your embrace, and cease your mumbling, Elidath!" Smiling broadly, Valentine seized the other man and pulled him close, and held him as friend holds friend. Elidath stiffened. His body was as rigid as wood. After a moment he pushed Valentine away and stepped back a pace, shivering.

"You need not fear me, Elidath."

"You ask too much of me. To believe such—"

"Believe it."

"I do, at least by half. The warmth of your eyes — the smile — the things you remember—"

"Believe the other half," Valentine urged passionately. "The Lady my mother sends you her love, Elidath. You will see her again, at the Castle, the day we hold festival to mark my restoration. Turn your troops around, dear friend, and join us as we march up the Mount."

There was warfare on Elidath’s face. His lips moved, a muscle in his cheek twitched violently. In silence he confronted Valentine.

Then at last he said, "This may be madness, but I accept you as what you claim."

"Elidath!"

"And I will join you, and may the Divine help you if I am misled."

"I promise you there will be no regretting this."

Elidath nodded. "I’ll send messengers to Tunigom—"

"Where is he?"

"He holds Peritole Pass against the thrust we expected from you. Stasilaine is there too. I was bitter, being left in command here in the plain, for I thought I’d miss all the action. Oh, Valentine, is it really you? With golden hair, and that sweet innocent look to your face?"

"The true Valentine, yes. I who slipped off with you to High Morpin when we were ten, borrowing the chariot of Voriax, and rode the juggernaut all day and half the night, and afterward had the same punishment as you—"

"—crusts of old stajja-bread for three days, indeed—"

"—and Stasilaine brought us a platter of meat secretly, and was caught, and he ate crusts with us too the next day—"

"—I had forgotten that part. And do you remember Voriax making us polish every part of the chariot where we had muddied it—"

"Elidath!"

"Valentine!"

They laughed and pounded each other joyously with their fists.

Then Elidath grew somber and said, "But where have you been? What has befallen you all this year? Have you suffered, Valentine? Have you—"

"It is a very long story," Valentine said gravely, "and this is not the place to tell it. We must halt this battle, Elidath. Innocent citizens are dying for Dominin Barjazid’s sake, and we cannot allow that. Rally your troops, turn them around."

"In this madhouse it won’t be easy."

"Give the orders. Get the word to the other commanders. The killing has to stop. And then ride with us, Elidath, onward to Bombifale, and then past High Morpin to the Castle."

—11—

VALENTINE RETURNED TO HIS CAR, and Elidath vanished into the confused and ragged line of the defenders. During the parley, Valentine discovered now from Ermanar, his people had made strong advances, keeping their wedge tight and pushing deep into the plain, throwing the vast but formless army of the false Coronal into nearly complete disarray. Now that relentless wedge continued to roll on, through helpless troops that had neither the will nor the desire to hold them back. With Elidath’s leadership and formidable battlefield presence negated, the defenders were spiritless and disorganized.

But it was that very pandemonium and tumult among the defenders that made halting the wasteful battle almost impossible. With hundreds of thousands of warriors moving in patternless streams over Bombifale Plain, and thousands more rushing in from the pass as news spread of Valentine’s attack, there was no way of exercising command over the entire mass. Valentine saw Elidath’s starburst banner flying in the midst of the madness, halfway across the field, and knew that he was striving to make contact with his fellow officers and tell them of the switch in loyalties; but the army was out of control, and soldiers were dying needlessly. Every casualty brought a stab of pain to Valentine.

He could do nothing about that. He signaled Ermanar to keep pressing onward.

Over the next hour a bizarre transformation of the battle began. Valentine’s wedge sliced forward almost without opposition, and a second phalanx now moved parallel to his, off to the east, led by Elidath, advancing with equal ease. The rest of the gigantic army that had occupied the plain was divided and confounded, and in a muddled way was fighting against itself, breaking into small groups that clung vociferously to tiny sectors of the plain and beat off anyone who approached.

Soon these feckless hordes lay far to Valentine’s rear, and the double column of invaders was entering the upper half of the plain, where the land began to curve bowl-fashion toward the crest on which Bombifale, oldest and most beautiful of the Inner Cities, stood. It was early afternoon, and as they ascended the slope the sky grew ever more clear and bright and the air warmer, for they were beginning to leave the Mount-girdling cloud-belt behind and emerge into the lower flanks of the summit zone, that lay bathed forever in shimmering sunlight.

And now Bombifale came into view, rising above them like a vision of antique splendor: great scalloped walls of burnt-orange sandstone set with huge diamond-shaped slabs of blue seaspar fetched from the shores of the Great Sea in Lord Pinitor’s time, and lofty needle-sharp towers sprouting on the battlements at meticulously regular intervals, slender and graceful, casting long shadows into the plain.

Valentine’s spirit throbbed with gathering joy and delight. Hundreds of miles of Castle Mount lay behind him, ring after ring of grand bustling cities, Slope Cities and Free Cities and Guardian Cities far below. The Castle itself was less than a day’s journey above, and the army that would have thwarted his climb had crumbled into pathetic turmoil behind him. And though he still felt the distant threatening twinges of the King of Dreams’ sendings at night, they were becoming only the merest tickle at the edges of his soul, and his beloved friend Elidath was ascending the Mount by his side, with Stasilaine and Tunigorn riding now to join them.

How good it was to behold the spires of Bombifale, and know what lay beyond! These hills, that towered city ahead, the dark thick grass of the meadows, the red stones of the mountain road from Bombifale to High Morpin, the dazzling flower-strewn fields that linked the Grand Calintane Highway from High Morpin to the southern wing of the Castle — he knew these places better than the sturdy but still somewhat unfamiliar body he now wore. He was almost home.

And then?

Deal with the usurper, yes, and set things to order — but the task was so awesome he scarcely knew where he would begin. He had been absent from Castle Mount almost two years, and deprived of power most of that time. The laws promulgated by Dominin Barjazid would have to be examined, and very likely repealed by blanket ordinance. And there was also the problem, which he had barely considered before this moment, of integrating the companions of his long wanderings into the former imperial officialdom, for surely he must find posts of power for Deliamber and Sleet and Zalzan Kavol and the rest, but there was Elidath to think of, and the others who had been central in his court. He could hardly discard them merely because he was coming home from his exile with new favorites. That was perplexing, but he hoped he would find some way of handling it that would breed no resentments and would cause no—

Deliamber said abruptly, "I fear new troubles heading in our direction, and not small ones."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you see any changes in the sky?"

"Yes," Valentine said. "It grows brighter and a deeper blue as we escape from the cloud-belt."

"Look more closely," said Deliamber.

Valentine peered upslope. Indeed he had spoken carelessly and too soon, for the brightening of the sky that he had noticed a short while ago was altered now, in a strange manner: there was a faint tinge of darkness overhead, as though a storm were coming on. No clouds were in sight, but an odd and sinister gray tint was moving in behind the blue. And the banners mounted on the floater-cars, which had been fluttering in a mild western breeze, had shifted and stood out stiffly to the south, blown by winds of sudden strength coming down from the summit.

"A change in the weather," Valentine said. "Rain, perhaps? But why are you concerned?"

"Have you ever known sudden changes in the weather to occur this high on Castle Mount?"

Valentine frowned. "Not commonly, no."

"Not ever," said Deliamber. "My lord, why is the climate of this region so benign?"

"Why, because it’s controlled from the Castle, artificially generated and governed by the great machines that—" He broke off, staring in horror.

"Exactly," Deliamber said.

"No! It’s unthinkable!"

"Think it, my lord," said the Vroon. "The Mount pierces high into the cold night of space. Above us in the Castle hides a terrified man who holds his throne by treachery, and who has just seen his most trusted generals desert to the side of his enemy. Now an invincible army climbs the summit of the Mount unhindered. How can he keep them from reaching him? Why, shut down the weather-machines and let this sweet air freeze in our lungs, let night fall in an afternoon and the darkness of the void come sweeping over us, turn this Mount back into the lifeless tooth of rock it was ten thousand years ago. Look at the sky, Valentine! Look at the banners in the wind!"

"But a billion people live on the Mount!" Valentine cried. "If he shuts down the weather-machines he destroys them along with us! And himself as well — unless he’s found some way to seal the Castle against the cold."

"Do you think he cares about his own survival now? He’s doomed in any event. But this way he can bring you down with him — you and everyone else on Castle Mount. Look at the sky, Valentine! Look at it darkening!"

Valentine found himself trembling, not out of fear but in anger that Dominin Barjazid should be willing to destroy all the cities of the Mount in this monstrous final cataclysm, to murder children and babes and mothers with child, and farmers in the fields and merchants in their shops, millions upon millions of the innocent who had no part in this struggle for the Castle. And why this slaughter? Why, merely to vent his rage at having lost what was never rightfully his! Valentine looked toward the sky, hoping to find some sign that this was only some natural phenomenon after all. But that was foolishness. Deliamber was right: on Castle Mount the weather was never a natural phenomenon.

In anguish Valentine said, "We are still far from the Castle. How long will it be before the freezing begins?"

Deliamber shrugged. "When the weather-machines first were constructed, my lord, it took many months before there was air dense enough to support life at these altitudes. Night and day the machines labored, yet it took months. Undoing that work will probably be faster than the doing of it was; but it will need more than an instant, I think."

"Can we reach the Castle in time to halt it?"

"It will be a close business, my lord," said the Vroon.

Grim-faced, scowling, Valentine ordered the car to halt and summoned his officers. Elidath’s vehicle, he saw, was already making its way laterally across the plain toward him in advance of the summons: plainly Elidath too had noticed that something was awry. As Valentine stepped from his car he shivered at the first touch of the air — though it was a shiver more of apprehension than of chill, for there was only the lightest hint of cooling thus far. Yet that was sufficiently ominous.

Elidath came running to his side. His expression was bleak. He pointed toward the darkening sky and said, "My lord, the madman is doing the worst!"

"I know. We also see the change beginning."

"Tunigorn is close below us now, and Stasilaine coming across by the Banglecode side. We must go on toward the Castle as fast as possible."

"Do you think we’ll have time?" Valentine asked.

Elidath managed a frosty grin. "Little enough to spare. But it’ll be the quickest homeward journey I’ll ever have made."

Sleet, Carabella, Lisamon Hultin, Asenhart, Ermanar, all were gathered close now, looking wholly mystified. These strangers to Castle Mount perhaps had noted the change in the weather, but had not drawn from it Elidath’s conclusions. They glanced from Valentine to Elidath and back again, troubled, dismayed, knowing that something was amiss but unable to comprehend the nature of it.

Crisply Valentine explained. Their looks of confusion gave way to disbelief, shock, rage, consternation.

"There will be no halt in Bombifale," Valentine said. "We go straight on to the Castle, via the High Morpin road, and no stopping of any kind between here and there." He looked toward Ermanar. "There is, I suppose, the possibility of panic among our forces. This must not happen. Assure your troops that we will be safe if only we reach the Castle in time, that panic is fatal and swift action the only hope. Understood? A billion lives depend on how fast we travel now — a billion lives and our own."

—12—

THIS WAS NOT THE joyous ascent of the Mount that Valentine had imagined. With the victory of Bombifale Plain he had felt a great burden lift from him, for he saw no further barriers standing between him and what he sought. He had envisioned a serene journey to the Inner Cities, a triumphant banquet in Bombifale while the Barjazid cowered in fearful anticipation above, then the climactic entry into the Castle, the seizure of the usurper, the proclamation of restoration, everything unfolding with grand inevitability. But that pleasant fantasy was blasted now. Upward they sped in desperate haste, and the sky grew darker moment by moment, and the wind down from the summit gained in force, and the air became raw and biting. What did they make of these changes, in Bombifale and Peritole and Banglecode, and higher yet in Halanx and the Morpins, and in the Castle itself? Certainly they must realize something hideous was in the making, as all the fair land of Castle Mount suffered under unfamiliar frigid blasts and the balmy afternoon turned into mysterious night. Did they understand the doom that was rushing upon them? What of the Castle folk — were they frantically trying to reach the weather-machines that their mad Coronal had shut down, or did the usurper have them barricaded and guarded, so that death might strike everyone impartially?

Bombifale now was close at hand. Valentine regretted passing it by, for his people had fought hard and were weary; but if they rested now in Bombifale they would rest there forever.

So it was upward and upward through the gathering night. However fast they moved, it was too slow for Valentine, who imagined the terrified crowds gathering in the grand plazas of the cities — vast chaotic hordes of the frightened, weeping, turning to one another, staring at the sky, crying out, "Lord Valentine, save us!" and not even knowing that the dark man to whom they sent their prayers was the instrument of their destruction. In his mind’s eye he saw the people of Castle Mount streaming out by the millions into the roads, beginning a dreadful panicky migration to the lower levels, hopeless, doomed, a frantic useless effort to outrace death. Valentine imagined, too, tongues of piercing wintry air sliding down the slopes, licking at the flawless plants of Tolingar Barrier, chilling the stone birds of Furible, blackening the elegant gardens of Stee and Minimool, turning the canals of Hoikmar to sheets of ice. Eight thousand years in the making, this miracle that was Castle Mount, and it might be destroyed in the twinkling of an eye by the folly of one cold and treacherous soul.

Valentine could reach out and touch Bombifale, so it seemed. Its walls and towers, perfect and heartachingly beautiful even in this strange failing light, beckoned to him. But he went on, and on and on, hastening now on the steep mountain road paved with ancient blocks of red stone. That was Elidath’s car close beside his on the left, and Carabella’s on the right, and not far away rode Sleet, Zalzan Kavol, Ermanar, Lisamon Hultin, and all the hordes of troops he had accumulated on his long journey. All hurried after their lord, not understanding the doom that was coming upon the world but aware that this was a moment of apocalypse when monumental evil stood near to triumph, and only courage, courage and haste, could block its victory.

Onward. Valentine clenched his fists and through sheer power of will tried to force the car higher. Deliamber, beside him, urged him to be calm, to be patient. But how? How, when the very air of Castle Mount was being stripped away molecule by molecule, and the darkest of nights was taking hold?

"Look," Valentine said. "Those trees that flank the road — the ones that bear the crimson-and-gold flowers? Those are halatingas, planted four hundred years ago. A festival is held at High Morpin when they come into bloom, and thousands of people dance down the road beneath them. And see, see? The leaves are shriveling already, turning black at the edges. They have never known temperatures so low, and the cold has only begun. What will happen to them in eight more hours? And what will happen to the people who loved to dance beneath them? If a mere chill withers the leaves, Deliamber, what will true frost do, and snow? Snow, on Castle Mount! Snow, and worse than snow, when the air is gone, when everything stands naked to the stars, Deliamber—"

"We are not yet lost, my lord. What city is that, now, above us?"

Valentine peered through the deepening shadows. "High Morpin — the pleasure-city, where the games are held."

"Think of the games that will be held there next month, my lord, to celebrate your restoration."

Valentine nodded. "Yes," he said, without irony. "Yes. I will think of the games next month, the laughter, the wine, the flowers on the trees, the songs of the birds. Is there no way to make this thing go faster, Deliamber?"

"It floats," said the Vroon, "but it will not fly. Be patient. The Castle is near."

"Hours, yet," Valentine said sullenly.

He struggled to regain his balance of soul. He reminded himself of Valentine the juggler, that innocent young man buried somewhere within him, standing in the stadium at Pidruid and reducing himself to nothing more than hand and eye, hand and eye, to perform the tricks he had only just learned. Steady, steady, steady, keep to the center of your soul, remember that life is merely a game, a voyage, a brief amusement, that Coronals can be gobbled by sea-dragons and tumbled about in rivers and mocked by pantomiming Metamorphs in a drizzly forest, and what of it? But those were poor consolations now. This was not a matter of one man’s misfortunes, which under the eye of the Divine were trivial enough, though that man had been a king. A billion innocent lives were threatened here, and a work of splendid art, this Mount, that might be unique in all the cosmos. Valentine stared at the deep reaches of the darkening sky, where, he feared, the stars would soon be shining through in afternoon. Stars out there, multitudes of worlds, and in all those worlds was there anything to compare with Castle Mount and the Fifty Cities? And would it all perish in an afternoon?

"High Morpin," said Valentine. "I had hoped my return to it would be happier."

"Peace," Deliamber whispered. "Today we pass it by. Another day you’ll come to it in joy."

Yes. The shining airy webwork that was High Morpin rose to view on the right, that fantasy-city, that city of play, all wonder and dream, a city spun from wires of gold, or so Valentine had often thought as a boy, looking at its marvelous buildings. He glanced at it now and quickly away. It was ten miles from High Morpin to the perimeter of the Castle — a moment, an eye-blink.

"Does this road have a name?" asked Deliamber.

"The Grand Calintane Highway," Valentine replied. "A thousand times I traveled it, Deliamber, back and forth to the pleasure-city. The fields beside it are so arranged that something is in bloom on every day of the year, and always in pleasing patterns of color, the yellows beside the blues, the reds far from the oranges, the whites and pinks in the borders, and look now, look at the flowers turning away from us, drooping on their stems—"

"They can be planted again, if the cold destroys them," said Deliamber. "But there’s time yet. These plants may not be as tender as you think."

"I feel the cold on them as though it were on my own skin."

Now they were in the highest reaches of Castle Mount, so far above the plains of Alhanroel that it was almost as though they had attained some other world, or some moon that hovered motionless in the sky of Majipoor.

Everything came to an end here in a fantastic upsweep of sharp-tipped peaks and crags. The summit aimed itself at the stars like a hundred spears, and in the midst of those strangely delicate stony spikes rose the odd rounded hump of the highest place of all, where Lord Stiamot had boldly planted his imperial residence eight thousand years ago in celebration of his conquest of the Metamorphs, and where, ever since, Coronal after Coronal had commemorated his own reign by adding rooms and outbuildings and spires and battlements and parapets. The Castle sprawled incomprehensibly over thousands of acres, a city in itself, a labyrinth more bewildering even than the lair of the Pontifex. And the Castle lay just ahead.

It was dark now. The cold pitiless splendor of the stars blazed overhead.

"The air must be gone," Valentine murmured. "The death will come soon, will it not?"

"This is true night, not the calamity," Deliamber answered. "We have journeyed all day without rest, and you’ve had no sense of the passing of time. The hour is late, Valentine."

"And the air?"

"Growing colder. Growing thinner. But not yet gone."

"And there is time?"

"There is time."

They came around the last stupefying turn in the Calintane Highway. Valentine remembered it well: the turn that whipped at a sharp curve around the neck of the mountain and presented stunned travelers with their first view of the Castle.

Valentine had never seen Deliamber amazed before.

In a hushed voice the wizard said, "What are those buildings, Valentine?"

"The Castle," he replied.

The Castle, yes. Lord Malibor’s Castle, Lord Voriax’ Castle, Lord Valentine’s Castle. Nowhere could one see the whole structure, or even any significant part of it, but from here, at least, one beheld an awesome segment of it, a great pile of masonry and brick rising in level upon level, in maze upon maze, spiraling round and round upon itself, dancing up the peak in eye-dazzling fashion, sparkling with the glow of a million lights.

Valentine’s fears dissolved, his morbid gloom lifted. At Lord Valentine’s Castle, Lord Valentine could feel no sorrow. He was coming home, and whatever wound had been inflicted upon the world would soon be healed.

The Calintane Highway reached its end at the Dizimaule Plaza, which lay before the Castle’s southern wing, a huge open space paved with cobblestones of green porcelain, with a golden starburst at its center. Here Valentine halted and descended from his car to assemble his officers.

A cold bleak wind was blowing, biting and brisk.

Carabella said, "Are there gates? Will we have to lay siege?"

Valentine smiled and shook his head. "No gates. Who would ever invade the Castle of the Coronal? We simply ride in, through the Dizimaule Arch yonder. But once we’re inside, we may face enemy troops again."

"The guards of the Castle are in my command," said Elidath. "I’ll deal with them."

"Good. Keep moving, keep in touch, trust in the Divine. By morning we’ll gather to celebrate our victory, I swear you that."

"Long life to Lord Valentine!" Sleet called out.

"Long life! Long life!"

Valentine lifted his arms, both as an acknowledgement and to silence their uproar.

"We celebrate tomorrow," he said. "Tonight we give battle, and may it be the last!"

—13—

HOW STRANGE IT FELT, finally to be passing under the Dizimaule Arch, and to see the baffling myriad splendors of the Castle before him!

As a boy he had played in these boulevards and avenues, had lost himself in the wonders of the endlessly intertangling passageways and corridors, had stared in awe at the mighty walls and towers and enclosures and vaults. As a young man in the service of Lord Voriax his brother he had dwelled within the Castle, over yonder in the Pinitor Court, where high officials had their residences, and many a time he had strolled on the parapet of Lord Ossier, with its stupendous view of the Morpin Plunge and the High Cities. And as Coronal, that brief time he had occupied the innermost zones of the Castle, he had with delight touched the ancient weather-beaten stones of Stiamot Keep, and walked alone through the vast echoing chamber of the Confalume throne-room, and studied the patterns of the stars from Lord Kinniken’s Observatory, and pondered what additions he would make to the Castle himself in years to come. Now that he was back, he realized how much he loved this place, and not merely because it was a symbol of power and imperial grandeur that had been his, but mainly because it was such a fabric of the ages, such a living, breathing weave of history.

"The Castle is ours!" cried Elidath jubilantly as Valentine’s army burst through the unguarded gate.

But what good was that, Valentine thought, if death for all the Mount and its squabbling mortals lay just a few hours away? Already too much time had elapsed since the thinning of the atmosphere had begun. Valentine wanted to reach out, to claw the fleeing air and hold in back.

The deepening chill that now lay like a terrible weight on Castle Mount was nowhere more manifest than in the Castle itself, and those within it, already dazed and bewildered by the events of the civil war, stood like waxen figures, unblinking and numb, shivering and immobile while the invading parties rushed inward. Some, shrewder or quicker of wit than the others, managed to croak, "Long live Lord Valentine!" as the unfamiliar golden-haired figure rode by; but most behaved as though their minds had already begun to freeze.

The hordes of attackers, flowing inward, moved swiftly and precisely toward the tasks Valentine had assigned. Duke Heitluig and his Bibiroon warriors had charge of seizing control of the Castle perimeter, flushing out and neutralizing any hostile forces. Asenhart and six detachments of valley people had the work of sealing all of the Castle’s many gates, so none of the usurper’s followers might escape. Sleet and Carabella and their troops went upward, toward the imperial halls of the inner sector to take possession of the seat of government. Valentine himself, with Elidath and Ermanar and their combined forces, set out on the spiraling lower causeway to the vaults where the weather-machines were housed. The rest, under command of Nascimonte, Zalzan Kavol, Shanamir, Lisamon Hultin, and Gorzval, went forth in random streams, spreading out over the Castle in search of Dominin Barjazid, who might be hiding in any of the thousands of rooms, even the meanest.

Down the causeway Valentine raced, until, in the murky depths of the cobbled passage, the floater-car could go no farther; and then on foot he sped toward the vaults. The cold was numbing against his nose and lips and ears. His heart pounded, his lungs worked fiercely in the thin air. These vaults were all but unknown to him. He had been down here only once or twice, long ago. Elidath, though, seemed to know the way.

Through corridors, down endless flights of wide stone stairs, into a high-roofed arcade lit by twinkling points far overhead — and all the time the air grew perceptibly more chilly, the unnatural night gripped the Mount more tightly—

A great arched wooden door, banded with thick metal inlays, loomed up before them.

"Force it," Valentine ordered. "Burn through it, if we must!"

"Wait, my lord," a mild quavering voice said.

Valentine whirled. An ancient Ghayrog, ashen-skinned, his serpent hair limp in the cold, had stepped from a doorway in the wall and came shambling uncertainly toward them.

"The keeper of the weather-machines," Elidath muttered.

The Ghayrog looked half dead. Bewilderedly he glanced from Elidath to Ermanar, from Ermanar to Valentine; and then he threw himself to the ground before Valentine, plucking at the Coronal’s boots.

"My lord— Lord Valentine— " He stared up in torment. "Save us, Lord Valentine! The machines — they have turned off the machines—"

"Can you open the gate?"

"Yes, my lord. The control-house is in this alley. But they have seized the vaults — his troops are in command, they forced me out — what damage are they doing in there, my lord? What will become of us all?"

Valentine pulled the quivering old Ghayrog to his feet. "Open the gate," he said.

"Yes, my lord. It will be only a moment—"

An eternity, rather, Valentine thought. But there came the sound of awesome subterranean machinery and gradually the sturdy wooden barrier, creaking and groaning, began to move aside.

Valentine would have been the first to dart through the opening, but Elidath caught him ungently by the arm and pulled him back. Valentine slapped at the hand that held him as though it were some bothersome vermin, some dhiim of the jungles. Elidath held firm.

"No, my lord," he said crisply.

"Let go, Elidath."

"If it costs me my head, Valentine, I will not let you go in there. Stand aside."

"Elidath!"

Valentine glanced toward Ermanar. But he found no support there. "The Mount freezes, my lord, while you delay us," Ermanar said.

"I will not allow—"

"Stand aside!" Elidath commanded.

"I am Coronal, Elidath."

"And I am responsible for your safety. You may direct the offensive from the outside, my lord. But there are enemy soldiers in there, desperate men, defending the last place of power the usurper controls. Let one sharp-eyed sniper see you, and all our struggle has been in vain. Will you stand aside, Valentine, or must I commit treason on your body to push you out of the way?"

Fuming, Valentine yielded, and watched in anger and frustration as Elidath and a band of picked warriors slipped past him into the inner vault. There was the sound of fighting almost at once within; Valentine heard shouts, energy-bolts, cries, moans. Though guarded by Ermanar’s watchful men, he was a dozen times at the brink of pulling away from them and entering the vault himself, but held back. Then a messenger came from Elidath to say that the immediate resistance was wiped out, that they were penetrating deeper, that there were barricades, traps, pockets of enemy soldiers every few hundred yards. Valentine clenched his fists. It was an impossible business, this thing of being too sacred to risk his skin, of standing about in an antechamber while the war of restoration raged all about him. He resolved to go in, and let Elidath bluster all he liked.

"My lord?" A messenger from the other direction, breathless, came running up.

Valentine hovered at the entrance to the vault. "What is it?" he snapped.

"My lord, I am sent by Duke Nascimonte. We have found Dominin Barjazid barricaded in the Kinniken Observatory, and he asks you to come quickly to direct the capture."

Valentine nodded. Better that than standing about idly here. To an aide-de-camp he said, "Tell Elidath I’m going back up. He has full authority to reach the weather-machines any way he can."

But Valentine was only a short distance up the passageways when Gorzval’s aide arrived, to say that the usurper was rumored to be in the Pinitor Court. And a few minutes later came word from Lisamon Hultin, that she was pursuing him swiftly down a spiraling passageway leading to Lord Siminave’s reflecting-pool.

In the main concourse Valentine found Deliamber, watching the action with a look of bemused fascination. Telling the Vroon of the conflicting reports, he asked, "Can he be in all three places?"

"None, more likely," the wizard replied. "Unless there are three of him. Which I doubt, though I feel his presence in this place, dark and strong."

"In any particular area?"

"Hard to tell. Your enemy’s vitality is such that he radiates himself from every stone of the Castle, and the echoes confuse me. But I will not be confused much longer, I think."

"Lord Valentine?"

A new messenger — and a familiar face, deep coarse brows meeting in the center, a jutting chin, an easy confident smile. Another unit of the vanished past fitting itself back into place, for this man was Tunigorn, second closest of all Valentine’s boyhood friends, now one of the high ministers of the realm, and now looking at the stranger before him with bright penetrating eyes, as if trying to find the Valentine behind the strangeness. Shanamir was with him.

"Tunigorn!" Valentine cried.

"My lord! Elidath said you were altered, but I had no idea—"

"Am I too strange to you with this face?"

Tunigorn smiled. "It will take some getting used to, my lord. But that can come in time. I bring you good news."

"Seeing you again is good news enough."

"But I bring you better. The traitor has been found."

"I have been told already three times in half an hour that he is in three different places."

"I know nothing of those reports. We have him."

"Where?"

"Barricaded in the inner chambers. The last to see him was his valet, old Kanzimar, loyal to the end, who finally saw him gibbering with terror and understood at last that this was no Coronal before him. He has locked off the entire suite, from the throne-room to the robing-halls, and is alone in there."

"Good news indeed!" To Deliamber Valentine said, "Do your wizardries confirm any of this?"

Deliamber’s tentacles stirred. "I feel a sour, malign presence in that lofty building."

"The imperial chambers," said Valentine. "Good." He turned to Shanamir and said, "Send out the word to Sleet, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol, Lisamon Hultin. I want them with me as we close in."

"Yes, my lord!" The boy’s eyes gleamed with excitement.

Tunigorn said, "Who are those people you named?"

"Companions of my wanderings, old friend. In my time of exile they became very dear to me."

"Then they will be dear to me as well, my lord. Whoever they may be, those who love you are those I love." Tunigorn drew his cloak close about him. "But what of this chill? When will it begin to lift? I heard from Elidath that the weather-machines—"

"Yes."

"And can they be repaired?"

"Elidath has gone to them. Who knows what damage the Barjazid has done? But have faith in Elidath." Valentine looked toward the inner palace high above him, narrowing his eyes as though he could in that manner see through the noble stone walls to the frightened shameless creature hiding behind them. "This coldness gives me great grief, Tunigorn," he said somberly. "But curing it now is in the hands of the Divine — and Elidath. Come. Let’s see if we can pluck that insect from its nest."

—14—

THE MOMENT OF FINAL RECKONING with Dominin Barjazid was close at hand now. Valentine moved swiftly, onward and inward and upward through all the familiar wonderful places.

This vaulted building was the archive of Lord Prestimion, where that great Coronal had assembled a museum of the history of Majipoor. Valentine smiled at the thought of installing his juggling clubs alongside the sword of Lord Stiamot and the jewel-studded cape of Lord Confalume. There, rising in amazing swoops, was the slender, fragile-looking watchtower built by Lord Arioc, a strange construction indeed, giving indication perhaps of the greater strangeness that Arioc would perpetrate when he moved on to the Pontificate. That, a double atrium with an elevated pool in its center, was the chapel of Lord Kinniken, adjoining the lovely white-tiled hall that was the residence of the Lady whenever she came to visit her son. And there, sloping glass roofs gleaming in the starlight, was Lord Confalume’s garden-house, the cherished private indulgence of that grandeur-loving pompous monarch, a place where tender plants from every part of Majipoor had been collected. Valentine prayed they would survive this night of wintry blasts, for he longed to go among them soon, with eyes made wiser by his travels, and revisit the wonders he had seen in the forests of Zimroel and on the Stoienzar shores. Upward—

Through a seemingly endless maze of hallways and staircases and galleries and tunnels and outbuildings, onward, onward. "We will die of old age, not cold, before we reach the Barjazid!" Valentine muttered.

"It will not be long now, my lord," Shanamir said.

"Not soon enough to please me."

"How will you punish him, my lord?"

Valentine glanced at the boy. "Punish? Punish? What punishment can there be for what he’s done? A whipping? Three days on stajja-crusts? Might as well punish the Steiche for having jostled us on the rocks."

Shanamir looked puzzled. "No punishment at all?"

"Not as you understand punishment, no."

"Turn him loose to do more mischief?"

"Not that either," said Valentine. "But first we must catch him, and then we can talk about what to do with him."

Half an hour more — it seemed forever — and Valentine stood before the core of the Castle, the walled imperial chambers, not nearly the oldest but by far the most sacrosanct of all its precincts. Early Coronals had had their governing-halls here, but they had long since been replaced by the finer and more awesome rooms of the great rulers of the past thousand years, and now constituted a glittering palatial seat of power, apart from all the other tangled intricacies of the Castle. The highest ceremonies of state took place in those high-vaulted splendid chambers; but now one single miserable being lurked in there, behind the ancient massive doors, protected by heavy ornate bolts of enormous size and weighty symbolic significance.

"Poison gas," Lisamon Hultin said. "Pump one canister of gas through the walls and drop him wherever he is."

Zalzan Kavol nodded vehemently. "Yes! Yes! See, a thin pipe slipped through these cracks — there is a gas they use in Piliplok for killing fish, that would do the job in—"

"No," Valentine said. "He will be brought out alive."

"Can it be done, my lord?" Carabella asked.

"We could smash the doors," rumbled Zalzan Kavol.

"Ruin Lord Prestimion’s doors, that were thirty years making, to fetch one rascal out of hiding?" Tunigorn asked. "My lord, this talk of a poison gas does not seem so foolish to me. We should not waste time—"

Valentine said, "We must take care not to act like barbarians. There will be no poisonings here." He caught Carabella’s hand, and Sleet’s, and raised them. "You are jugglers, with quick fingers. And you, Zalzan Kavol. Have you no experience at using those fingers for other things?"

"Picking locks, my lord?" Sleet asked.

"And things of that order, yes. There are many entrances to these chambers, and perhaps not all are secured by bolts. Go, try to find a way past the barriers. And while you do that I’ll seek another way."

He stepped forward to the giant gilded door, twice the height of the tallest of Skandars, carved over every square inch with images in high relief of the reign of Lord Prestimion and his celebrated predecessor Lord Confalume. He put his hands to the heavy bronze handles as though he meant to open the door with a single hearty heave.

For a long moment Valentine stood that way, casting from his mind all awareness of the tension that swirled about him. He attempted to move to the quiet place at the center of his soul. But a powerful obstacle blocked him:

His mind was filled suddenly with overwhelming hatred for Dominin Barjazid.

Behind that great door was the man who had thrust him from his throne, who had sent him forth as a hapless wanderer, who had ruled rashly and unjustly in his name, and — worst of all, wholly monstrous and unforgivable — who had chosen to destroy a billion blameless and unsuspecting people when his own schemes began to falter.

Valentine loathed him for that. For that, Valentine ached to destroy Dominin Barjazid.

As he stood clinging to the handles of the door, fierce violent images assailed his mind. He saw Dominin Barjazid flayed alive, cloaked in his own blood, screaming screams that could be heard from there to Pidruid. He saw Dominin Barjazid nailed to a tree with barbed arrows. He saw Dominin Barjazid crushed beneath a hail of stones. He saw—

Valentine trembled with the force of his own terrible rage.

But one did not flay one’s enemies alive in a civilized society, and one did not freely vent one’s anger in violence — not even upon a Dominin Barjazid. How, Valentine wondered, can I claim the right to rule a world, when I can’t even rule my own emotions? So long as this rage roiled his soul he was as unfit to govern, he knew, as Dominin Barjazid himself. He must do battle with it. That pounding in the temples, that rush of blood, that savage hunger for vengeance — all must be purged before he made any move toward Dominin Barjazid.

Valentine struggled. He let the clenched muscles of his back and shoulders relax, and filled his lungs with the sharp chill air, and moment by moment allowed the tension to drain from his body. He searched his soul where the hot fiery vengeance-lust had so suddenly flared in it, and swept it clean. And then he was able to move at last to the quiet place at the center of his soul and hold himself there, so that he felt himself alone in the Castle but for Dominin Barjazid somewhere on the far side of the door, only the two of them and a single barrier between. Conquest over self was the finest of victories: all else must follow, Valentine knew.

He yielded himself up to the power of the silver circlet of the Lady his mother, and entered into the dream-state, and sent forth the strength of his mind toward his enemy.

It was no dream of vengeance and punishment that Valentine sent. That would be too obvious, too cheap, too easy. He sent a gentle dream, a dream of love and friendship, of sadness for what had befallen. Dominin Barjazid could only be astounded by such a message. Valentine showed Dominin Barjazid the dazzling glittering pleasure-city of High Morpin, and the two of them walking side by side down the Avenue of Clouds, talking amiably, smiling, discussing the differences that separated them, trying to resolve frictions and apprehensions. It was a risky way to begin these dealings, for it exposed him to derision and contempt, if Dominin Barjazid chose to misunderstand Valentine’s motives. Yet there was no hope of defeating him through threats and rage; perhaps a softer way might win. It was a dream that took vast reserves of spirit, for it was naive to expect Barjazid to be seduced by guile, and unless the love that radiated from Valentine was genuine, and made itself felt to be genuine, the dream was a foolishness. Valentine had not known he could find love in him for this man who had worked so much harm. But he found it; he spun it forth; he sent it through the great door.

When he had done, he clung to the door-handles, recouping his strength, and waited for some sign from within.

Unexpectedly what came was a sending: a powerful blast of mental energy, startling and overwhelming, that roared out of the imperial chambers like the fury of a hot Suvrael wind. Valentine felt the searing blast of Dominin Barjazid’s mocking rejection. Barjazid wanted no love, no friendship. He sent defiance, hatred, anger, contempt, belligerence: a declaration of perpetual war.

The impact was intense. How did it come to pass, Valentine wondered, that the Barjazid was capable of sendings? Some machine of his father, no doubt, some witchery of the King of Dreams. He realized that he should have anticipated something like that. But no matter. Valentine stood fast in the withering force of the dream-energy Dominin Barjazid hurled at him.

And afterward sent back another dream, as easy and trusting as Dominin Barjazid’s had been harsh and hostile. He sent a dream of pardon, of total forgiveness. He showed Dominin Barjazid a harbor, a fleet of Suvraelu ships waiting to return him to his father’s land, and even a grand parade, Valentine and Barjazid side by side in a chariot, riding down to the waterfront for the ceremonies of departure, standing together on the quay, laughing as they exchanged their farewells, two good enemies who had had at each other with all the power at their command and now were parting pleasantly.

From Dominin Barjazid came an answering dream of death and destruction, of loathing, of abomination, of scorn.

Valentine shook his head slowly, heavily, trying to clear it of the muck of poison coming toward him. A third time he gathered his strength and readied a sending for his foe. Still he would not descend to Barjazid’s level; still he hoped to overwhelm him with warmth and kindness, though another might say it was folly even to make the attempt. Valentine shut his eyes and centered his consciousness in the silver circlet.

"My lord?"

A woman’s voice, cutting through his concentration just as he was slipping into trance.

The interruption was jarring and painful. Valentine spun around, ablaze with unaccustomed fury, so shaken by surprise that it was a moment before he could recognize the woman as Carabella, and she drew back from him, gasping, momentarily afraid.

"My lord—" she said in a tiny voice. "I didn’t know—"

He struggled to control himself. "What is it?"

"We — we have found a way to open a door."

Valentine closed his eyes and felt his rigid body going slack with relief. He smiled and drew her to him, and held her a moment, trembling as tension discharged itself in him. Then he said, "Take me there!"

Carabella led him down corridors rich with antique draperies and thick well-worn carpets. She moved with a sureness of direction surprising in one who had never walked these halls before. They came to a part of the imperial chambers that Valentine did not remember, a service access somewhere beyond the throne-room, a simple and humble place. Sleet, riding on Zalzan Kavol’s shoulders, had the upper half of his body poked deep within some transom, and was reaching down to perform delicate manipulations on the inner side of a plain door. Carabella said, "We’ve opened three doors this way and now Sleet’s infiltrating the fourth. In another moment—"

Sleet pulled his head out and looked around, dusty, grimy, wondrously pleased with himself. "It’s open, my lord."

"Well done!"

"We’ll go in and get him," Zalzan Kavol growled. "Do you want him in three pieces or five, my lord?"

"No," Valentine said. "I’ll go in. Alone."

"You, my lord?" Zalzan Kavol asked in an incredulous tone.

"Alone?" said Carabella.

Sleet, looking outraged, cried, "My lord, I forbid you—" and stopped, bewildered by the sacrilege of his own words.

Mildly Valentine said, "Have no fears for me. This is something I must do without help. Sleet, step aside. Zalzan Kavol — Carabella — stand back. I order you not to enter until you’re summoned."

They stared at one another in confusion. Carabella began to say something, faltered, closed her mouth. Sleet’s scar throbbed and blazed. Zalzan Kavol made odd rumbling sounds and swung his four arms impotently.

Valentine pulled open the door and strode through. He was in a vestibule of some kind, perhaps a kitchen passageway, nothing a Coronal was likely to be familiar with. He walked warily through it and emerged into a richly brocaded hall, which after a moment’s disorientation he recognized as the robing-room; beyond it was the Dekkeret Chapel, and that led to the judgment-hall of Lord Prestimion, a grand vaulted chamber with splendid windows of frosted glass and magnificent chandeliers manufactured by the finest craftsmen of Ni-moya. And beyond that was the throne-room, with the Confalume Throne of supreme grandeur dominating everything. Somewhere in that suite Valentine would find Dominin Barjazid.

He moved forward into the robing-room. It was empty, and looked as though no one had made use of it for months. The stone archway of the Dekkeret Chapel was uncurtained; Valentine peered through it, saw no one there, and continued through the short curving passage, decorated with brilliant mosaic ornaments in green and gold, that connected with the judgment-hall.

He drew in his breath deeply and laid hands on the judgment-hall door and flung it open.

At first he thought that that vast space also was empty. Only one of the great chandeliers was lit, and that one at the far end, casting but a dim glow. Valentine looked to left and right, down the rows of polished wooden benches, past the curtained alcoves in which dukes and princes were permitted to conceal themselves while judgment was passed upon them, toward the high seat of the Coronal—

And saw a figure in imperial robes standing in the shadows at the council-table below the high seat.

—15—

OF ALL THE STRANGENESSES of his time of exile, this was the most strange of all, to stand less than a hundred feet from one who wore what once had been his own visage. Twice before, Valentine had seen the false Coronal, on that day of festival in Pidruid, and he had felt soiled and drained of energy when he had looked upon him, without knowing why. But that was before he had regained his memory. Now, in the dimness, he beheld a tall, strong man, fierce-eyed, black-bearded, the Lord Valentine of old, princely in bearing, not at all cowering or gibbering or terrified, confronting him with cold calm menace. Was that how I looked? Valentine wondered. So bleak, so icy, so forbidding? He supposed that during all these months when Dominin Barjazid had been in possession of his body, the darkness of the usurper’s soul had leaked out through the face, and changed the Coronal’s cast of features to this morbid hateful expression. Valentine had grown used to his own amiable sunny new face, and now, seeing the one he had worn so many years, he felt no wish to have it back.

Dominin Barjazid said, "I made you pretty, didn’t I?"

"And made yourself less so," said Valentine cordially. "Why do you scowl, Dominin? That face was once better known for its smile."

"You smiled too much, Valentine. You were too easy, too mild, too light of soul to rule."

"Is that how you saw me?"

"I and many others. I understand you’ve become a wandering juggler these days."

Valentine nodded. "I needed a trade, after you took away the one I had. Juggling suited me."

"It would have," Barjazid said. His voice echoed in the long empty chamber. "You were always best at giving amusement to others. I invite you to return to juggling, Valentine. The seals of power are mine."

"The seals are yours, but not the power. Your guards have deserted you. The Castle is secure against you. Come, give yourself up, Dominin, and we will return you to your father’s land."

"What of the weather-machines, Valentine?"

"Those have been turned back on."

"A lie! A silly lie!" Barjazid whirled and threw open one of the tall arching windows. A blast of frigid air rushed in so swiftly that Valentine, at the other end of the room, could feel it almost at once. "The machines are guarded by the people I most trust," said Barjazid. "Not your people, but my own, that I brought from Suvrael. They will keep them off until the order comes from me to turn them on, and if all of Castle Mount turns black and perishes before that order comes, so be it, Valentine. So be it! Will you let that happen?"

"It will not happen."

"It will," said Barjazid, "if you remain in the Castle. Go. I grant you safe conduct down the Mount, and free passage to Zimroel. Juggle in the western towns, as you did a year ago, and forget this foolishness of claiming the throne. I am Lord Valentine the Coronal."

"Dominin—"

"Lord Valentine is my name! And you are the wandering juggler Valentine of Zimroel! Go, take up your trade."

Lightly Valentine said, "It’s a powerful temptation, Dominin. I enjoyed performing, perhaps more than anything I’ve done in my life. Nevertheless, destiny requires me to carry the burdens of government, regardless of my private wishes. Come, now." He took a step toward Barjazid, another, another. "Come with me, out to the antechamber, so we can show the knights of the Castle that this rebellion is over and the world returns to its true pattern."

"Stay back!"

"I mean no harm to you, Dominin. In a way I feel grateful to you, for some extraordinary experiences, things that would surely never have befallen me but for—"

"Back! Not another step!"

Valentine continued to advance. "And grateful, too, for ridding me of that annoying little limp, which interfered with some of the pleasures of—"

"Not — another — step—"

Barely a dozen feet separated them now. Beside Dominin Barjazid was a table laden with the paraphernalia of the judgment-hall: three heavy brazen candlesticks, an imperial orb, and next to it a scepter. Uttering a strangled cry of rage, Barjazid seized a candlestick with both hands and hurled it savagely at Valentine’s head. But Valentine stepped deftly aside and with a neat snap of his hand caught the massive metal implement as it went by. Barjazid hurled another. Valentine caught that too.

"One more," Valentine said. "Let me show you how it’s done!"

Barjazid’s face was mottled with fury: he choked, he hissed, he snorted in anger. The third candlestick flew toward Valentine. Valentine already had the first two in motion, spinning easily end over end from hand to hand, and it was no task at all for him to snatch the third and fit it into sequence, forming a gleaming cascade in the air before him. Blithely he juggled them, laughing, tossing them ever higher, and how good it felt to be juggling again, to be using the old skills after so long, hand and eye, hand and eye.

"See?" he said. "Like this. We can teach you, Dominin. You only need to learn to relax. Here, throw me the scepter as well, and the orb. I can do five, and maybe even more than that. A pity the audience is so small, but—"

Still juggling, he walked toward Barjazid, who backed away, eyes wide, chin flecked with spittle.

And abruptly Valentine was rocked and swayed by a sending of some sort, a waking dream that hit him with the force of a blow. He halted, stunned, and the candlesticks tumbled dangerously to the dark wooden floor. There came a second blow, dizzying him, and a third. Valentine struggled to keep from falling. The game he had been playing with Barjazid was ended now, and some new encounter had begun that Valentine did not comprehend at all.

He rushed forward, meaning to seize his adversary before the force struck him again.

Barjazid retreated, holding his trembling hands before his face. Was this onslaught coming from him, or did he have an ally hidden in the room? Valentine recoiled as that inexorable unseen power thrust against his mind once more, even more numbingly. He shook. He pressed his hands to his temples and tried to collect his senses. Catch Barjazid, he told himself, get him down, sit on him, yell for assistance—

He sprang forward, lunged, seized the false Coronal’s arm. Barjazid yelled and pulled free. Advancing, Valentine sought to corner him, and nearly did, but abruptly, with a wild shriek of fear and frustration, Dominin Barjazid darted past him and went scrambling across the room. He dived into one of the curtained alcoves on the far side, crying, "Help me! Father, help me!"

Valentine followed and ripped away the curtain.

And stood back in astonishment. Concealed in the alcove was a powerfully built, fleshy old man, dark-eyed, glowering, wearing on his forehead a glittering golden circlet, and grasping in one hand some device of ivory and gold, some thing of straps and hasps and levers. Simonan Barjazid he was, the King of Dreams, the terrifying old haunter out of Suvrael, skulking here in the judgment-hall of the Coronal! It was he who had sent the mind-numbing dream-commands that nearly had felled Valentine; and he struggled now to send another, but was prevented by the distraction of his own son, who clung hysterically to him, begging for help.

Valentine knew this was more than he could handle alone.

"Sleet!" he called. "Carabella! Zalzan Kavol!"

Dominin Barjazid sobbed and moaned. The King of Dreams kicked at him as if he were some bothersome dog nipping at his heels. Valentine edged cautiously into the alcove, hoping to snatch that dread dream-machine from old Simonan Barjazid before he could work more damage with it.

And as Valentine reached for it, something more astounding yet occurred. The outlines of Simonan Barjazid’s face and body began to waver, to blur— To change—

To turn into something monstrously strange, to become angular and slender, with eyes that sloped inward and a nose that was a mere bump and lips that could scarcely be seen — A Metamorph.

Not the King of Dreams at all, but a counterfeit, a masquerade King, a Shapeshifter, a Piurivar, a Metamorph—

Dominin Barjazid screamed in horror and let go of the bizarre figure, recoiling and throwing himself down, quivering and whimpering, against the wall. The Metamorph glared at Valentine in what surely was unalloyed hatred and hurled the dream-device at him with ferocious violence. Valentine could only partly shield himself; the machine caught him in the chest and knocked him awry, and in that moment the Metamorph rushed past him, dashed frantically to the far side of the room, and in a wild scramble leaped over the sill of the window that Dominin Barjazid had opened, flinging himself out into the night.

—16—

PALE, SHAKEN, VALENTINE TURNED and saw the room full of people: Sleet, Zalzan Kavol, Deliamber, Shanamir, Carabella, Tunigorn, and he could not tell how many others, hastily pressing in through the narrow vestibule. He pointed toward Dominin Barjazid, who lay huddled in a pitiful state of shock and collapse.

"Tunigorn, I give you charge of him. Take him to a secure place and see that no harm comes to him."

"The Pinitor Court, my lord, is safest. And a dozen picked men will guard him every instant."

Valentine nodded. "Good. I don’t want him left alone. And get a doctor to him: he’s had a monstrous fright, and I think it’s done him harm." He looked toward Sleet. "Friend, are you carrying a wine-flask? I’ve had some strange moments here myself." Sleet reached a flask to him; Valentine’s hand quivered, and he nearly spilled the wine before he got it to his lips.

Calmer now, he walked to the window through which the Metamorph had leaped. Lanterns gleamed somewhere far below. It was a fall of a hundred feet, or more, and in the courtyard down there he saw figures surrounding something that lay covered with a cloak. Valentine turned away.

"A Metamorph," he said in bewilderment. "Was it only a dream? I saw the King of Dreams standing there — and then it was a Metamorph — and then it rushed to the window—"

Carabella touched his arm. "My lord, will you rest now? The Castle is won."

"A Metamorph," Valentine said again, with wonder in his voice. "What could it have—"

"There were Metamorphs also in the hall of the weather-machines," said Tunigorn.

"What?" Valentine stared. "What did you say?"

"My lord, Elidath has just come up from the vaults with a strange story." Tunigorn gestured; and out of the crowd at the back of the room stepped Elidath himself, looking battle-weary, his cloak stained and his doublet torn.

"My lord?"

"The weather-machines—"

"They are unharmed, and the air and warmth go forth again, my lord."

Valentine let out a long sigh. "Well done! And there were Shapeshifters, you say?"

"The hall was guarded by troops in the uniform of the Coronal’s own guard," said Elidath. "We challenged them, we ordered them to yield, and they would not, even to me. Whereupon we fought them, and we — slew them, my lord—"

"There was no other way?"

"No other way," Elidath said. "We slew them, and as they died they — changed—"

"Every one?"

"All were Metamorphs, yes."

Valentine shivered. Strangeness upon strangeness in this nightmare revolution! He felt exhaustion rushing upon him. The engines of life turned again; the Castle was his, and the false Coronal a prisoner; the world was redeemed, order restored, the threat of tyranny averted. And yet — and yet — there was this new mystery, and he was so terribly tired—

"My lord," said Carabella, "come with me."

"Yes," he said hollowly. "Yes, I’ll rest a little while." He smiled faintly. "See me to the couch in the robing-room, will you, my love? I think I will rest, an hour or so. When was it that I last slept, do you recall?"

Carabella slipped her arm through his. "It seems like days, doesn’t it?"

"Weeks. Months. Just an hour — don’t let me sleep more than that—"

"Of course, my lord."

He sank to the couch like one who had been drugged. Carabella drew a coverlet over him and darkened the room, and he curled up, letting his weary body go limp. But through his mind darted luminous images: Dominin Barjazid clinging to that old man’s knees, and the King of Dreams angrily trying to shake him off, all the while waving that strange machine about, and then the shifting of shapes, the eerie Piurivar face glaring at him — Dominin Barjazid’s terrifying cry — the Metamorph rushing toward the open window — again and again, again and again, scenes beyond comprehension acting themselves out in Valentine’s tormented mind—

And sleep came over him gently, slipping up on him as he lay wrestling with the demons of the judgment-hall.

He slept the hour he had asked, and something more than that, for when he woke it was because the bright golden light of morning was in his eyes. He sat up, blinking and stretching. His body ached. A dream, he thought, a wild and bewildering dream of — no, no dream. No dream.

"My lord, are you rested?"

Carabella, Sleet, Deliamber. Watching him. Standing guard over his slumber.

Valentine smiled. "I’m rested, yes. And the night is gone. What has been happening?"

"Little enough," said Carabella, "except that the air grows warm again, and the Castle rejoices, and word is spreading down the Mount of the change that has come upon the world."

"The Metamorph who sprang from the window — was it killed?"

"Indeed, my lord," said Sleet.

"It wore the robes and regalia of the King of Dreams, and carried one of his devices. How was that, do you think?"

Deliamber said, "I can make guesses, my lord. I have spoken with Dominin Barjazid — he is the next thing to a madman now, and will be a long time healing, if ever — and he told me certain things. Last year, my lord, his father the King of Dreams fell gravely ill and was thought close to death. This was while you still held the throne."

"I recall nothing of that."

"No," said the Vroon, "they made no advertisement of it. But it looked perilous, and then a new physician came to Suvrael, someone of Zimroel who claimed great skills, and indeed the King of Dreams made a miraculous recovery, like one who had risen from the dead. It was then, my lord, that the King of Dreams placed into his son’s mind the notion of trapping you in Til-omon, and displacing you from the throne."

Valentine gasped. "The physician — a Metamorph?"

"Indeed," said Deliamber. "Masquerading, by his art, as a man of your race. And masquerading afterward as Simonan Barjazid, I think, until undone by the frenzy and confusion of that struggle in the judgment-hall, which caused the metamorphosis to waver and fail."

"And Dominin? Is he also—"

"No, my lord, he is the true Dominin, and the sight of the thing that pretended to be his father has wrecked his mind. But do you see, it was the Metamorph that put him up to the usurpation, and one might suppose another Metamorph would have replaced Dominin, by and by, as Coronal."

"And Metamorphs guarding the weather-machines — obeying not Dominin’s orders, but the false King’s! A secret revolution, is it, Deliamber? Not at all a seizure of power by the Barjazid family, but the beginning of a rebellion by the Shapeshifters?"

"So I fear, my lord."

Valentine stared into emptiness. "Much is explained now. And much more is cast into disorder."

Sleet said, "My lord, we must search them out and destroy them wherever they hide among us, and bottle the rest up in Piurifayne where they can do us no harm!"

"Easy, friend," Valentine said. "Your hatred of Metamorphs still lives, eh?"

"And with reason!"

"Yes, perhaps so. Well, we will search them out, and have no secret Metamorphs pretending to be Pontifex or Lady or even the keeper of the stables. But I think also we must reach toward those people, and heal them of their anger if we can, or Majipoor will be thrown into endless war." He rose and fastened his cloak and held his arms high. "Friends, we have work to do, I fear, and no small measure of it. But first comes celebration! Sleet, I name you the chancellor of my restoration festivities, to plan the banquet and arrange the entertainments and summon the guests. Let the word go forth to Majipoor that all is well, or nearly so, and Valentine’s on his throne again!"

—17—

THE CONFALUME THRONE-ROOM was the largest and grandest of the rooms of the Castle, with glittering gilded beams and fine tapestries and a floor of smooth gurna-wood from the Khyntor peaks, a hall of splendor and majesty in which the most significant of imperial ceremonies took place. But rarely had the Confalume throne-room beheld a spectacle such as this.

For high on the great many-stepped Confalume Throne sat Lord Valentine the Coronal, and on a throne to his left, nearly as lofty, sat the Lady his mother, resplendent in a gown all of white, and to his right, on a throne of the same height as the Lady’s, was Hornkast the high spokesman of the Pontifex, for Tyeveras had sent his regrets and Hornkast in his place. And arrayed before them, virtually filling the room, were the dukes and princes and knights of the realm, such an assembly as had not been seen in one place since the days of Lord Confalume himself — overlords out of far Zimroel, from Pidruid and Til-omon and Narabal, and the Ghayrog duke from Dulorn, and the great ones of Piliplok and Ni-moya and fifty other cities of Zimroel, and a hundred more of Alhanroel, beyond the fifty of Castle Mount. But not all this throng were dukes and princes, for there were humbler people also, Gorzval the stump-armed Skandar and Cordeine who had been his sailmender and Pandelon his carpenter, and Vinorkis the Hjort dealer in haigus hides, and the boy Hissune of the Labyrinth, and Tisana the old dream-speaker of Falkynkip, and many more of no rank higher than that, standing among these grandees with faces shining in awe.

Lord Valentine rose and saluted his mother, and rendered a salute to Hornkast, and bowed as the cries went up, "Long live the Coronal!" And when silence fell he said quietly, "Today we hold grand festival, to celebrate the restoration of the commonwealth and the making whole of the order of things. We have entertainment for you this day."

He clapped his hands and there was music: horns, drums, pipes, a lively and lilting outburst of melody, a dozen players striding into the room, Shanamir leading them. And behind them came the jugglers, in costumes of surpassing beauty, costumes worthy of great princes: Carabella first, and little scar-faced white-haired Sleet just back of her, and then gruff shaggy Zalzan Kavol and the two brothers who remained to him. They carried juggling gear of many kinds, swords and knives and sickles, torches ready to be lit, eggs, plates, gaily painted clubs, and a host of other things. When they reached the center of the room they took up their positions facing one another along the points of an imaginary star, and stood straight-shouldered and poised.

"Wait," said Lord Valentine. "There’s room for one more!"

Step by step down the Confalume Throne he came, until he was three steps from the bottom. He grinned at the Lady, and winked at young Hissune, and gestured to Carabella, who flung a blade at him. He caught it neatly and she threw another, and a third, and he began to juggle them on the steps of the throne, as he had vowed to do so long ago on the Isle of Sleep.

It was the signal, and the juggling commenced, and the air glistened with a multitude of strange objects that seemed to fly of their own accord. Never had juggling of such quality been seen in the known universe, Lord Valentine was sure of that. He threw from the throne another few moments, and then he came down into the group, laughing, in high joy, interchanging sickles and torches with Sleet and the Skandars and Carabella. "As in the old days!" Zalzan Kavol called. "But you’re even better now, my lord!"

"The audience inspires me," replied Lord Valentine.

"And can you juggle as a Skandar can?" said Zalzan Kavol. "Here, my lord! Catch! Catch! Catch! Catch!" Seemingly from out of the air Zalzan Kavol plucked eggs and plates and clubs, his four arms never ceasing to weave and seize, and each thing he caught he sent toward Lord Valentine, who tirelessly received and juggled and passed off to Sleet or Carabella, while the cheers of the audience — no mere flattery, that was certain — resounded in his ears. Yes! This was the life! As in the old days, yes, but even better now! He laughed and caught a shimmering sword and sent it high. Elidath had thought it might be unseemly for a Coronal to do such a thing as juggle before the princes of the realm, and Tunigorn had felt the same, but Lord Valentine had overruled them, telling them with kindness and love that he cared not at all for protocol. And now he saw them watching open-mouthed from their places of honor, stupefied by the skill of this amazing exhibition.

And yet he knew his time had come to quit the juggling-floor. One by one he emptied his hands of the objects he had caught, and gradually he retreated. When he had reached the first step of the throne he halted and beckoned to Carabella.

"Come," he said. "Join me up here, and now we become spectators."

Her cheeks deepened in color, but without faltering she rid herself of the clubs and knives and eggs, and moved toward the throne. Lord Valentine took her by the hand and together they ascended.

"My lord—" she whispered.

"Shhh. This is very serious business. Careful you don’t trip on the steps."

"I trip? I, a juggler?"

"Pardon me, Carabella."

She laughed. "I pardon you, Valentine."

"Lord Valentine."

"Is that how it is to be, my lord?"

"Not really," he said. "Not between the two of us." They reached the highest step. The double seat, gleaming in green and gold velvet, awaited them. Lord Valentine stood a moment, looking out at the throng, at the dukes and princes and the common folk. "Where’s Deliamber?" he whispered. "I don’t see him!"

"He had no taste for this event," said Carabella, "and has gone off to Zimroel, I think, on holiday. Wizards are bored by such festivities. And the Vroon was never fond of juggling, you know."

"He should be here," Lord Valentine murmured.

"When you need him again, he’ll return."

"I hope so. Come: let’s sit now."

They took their places on the throne. Below, the remaining jugglers were engaged in their most dazzling routines, which seemed miraculous even to Lord Valentine who knew the secrets of timing that underlay them; and as he watched, he felt a strange sadness come over him, for he had withdrawn himself from the company of the jugglers now, he had drawn apart to mount the throne, and that was a grave and solemn alteration of his life. He knew beyond doubt that his time as a wandering juggler, the freest and in some ways the most joyful time of his life, was ended now, and the responsibilities of power, which he had not sought but which he had not been able to refuse, were descending on him in their full weight once again. He could not deny the sorrow of that. To Carabella he said, "Perhaps privately — when the court is looking the other way — we can all get together now and then, and throw the clubs, eh, Carabella?"

"I think so, my lord. I would like that."

"And we can pretend — that we’re somewhere between Falkynkip and Dulorn, wondering if the Perpetual Circus will hire us, wondering if we can find an inn, if— if— "

"My lord, look at what the Skandars are doing! Can you believe the skill of it! So many arms, and every one busy!"

Lord Valentine smiled. "I must ask Zalzan Kavol to tell me how that one is done," he said. "Someday soon. When I have time."