Valentine Pontifex

1

Valentine swayed, braced himself with his free hand against the table, struggled to keep himself from spilling his wine.

This is very odd, he thought, this dizziness, this confusion. Too much wine—the stale air—maybe gravity pulls harder, this far down below the surface—

“Propose the toast, lordship,” Deliamber murmured. “First to the Pontifex, and then to his aides, and then—”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

Valentine peered uncertainly from side to side, like a steetmoy at bay, ringed round by the spears of hunters.

“Friends—” he began.

“To the Pontifex Tyeveras!” Deliamber whispered sharply.

Friends. Yes. Those who were most dear to him, seated close at hand. Almost everyone but Carabella and Elidath: she was on her way to meet him in the west, was she not, and Elidath was handling the chores of government on Castle Mount in Valentine’s absence. But the others were here, Sleet, Deliamber, Tunigorn, Shanamir, Lisamon and Ermanar, Tisana, the Skandar Zalzan Kavol, Asenhart the Hjort—yes, all his dear ones, all the pillars of his life and reign—

“Friends,” he said, “lift your wine-bowls, join me in one more toast. You know that it has not been granted me by the Divine to enjoy an easy time upon the throne. You all know the hardships that have been thrust upon me, the challenges that had to be faced, the tasks required of me, the weighty problems still unresolved.”

“This is not the right speech, I think,” he heard someone behind him say.

Deliamber muttered again, “His majesty the Pontifex! You must offer a toast to his majesty the Pontifex!”

Valentine ignored them. These words that came from him now seemed to come of their own accord.

“If I have borne these unparalleled difficulties with some grace,” he went on, “it is only because I have had the support, the counsel, the love, of such a band of comrades and precious friends as few rulers can ever have claimed. It is with your indispensable help, good friends, that we will come at last to a resolution of the troubles that afflict Majipoor and enter into the era of true amity that we all desire. And so, as we make ready to set forth tomorrow into this realm of ours, eagerly, joyously, to undertake the grand processional, I offer this last toast of the evening, my friends, to you, to those who have sustained me and nurtured me throughout all these years, and who—”

“How strange he looks,” Ermanar murmured. “Is he ill?”

A spasm of astonishing pain swept through him. There was a terrible droning buzz in his ears, and his breath was as hot as flame. He felt himself descending into night, a night so terrible that it obliterated all light and swept across his soul like a tide of black blood. The wine-bowl fell from his hand and shattered; and it was as if the entire world had shattered, flying apart into thousands of crumbling fragments that went tumbling crazily toward every corner of the universe. The dizziness was overwhelming now. And the darkness—that utter and total night, that complete eclipse—

“Lordship!” someone bellowed. Could that have been Hissune?

“He’s having a sending!” another voice cried.

“A sending? How, while he is awake?”

“My lord! My lord! My lord!”

Valentine looked downward. Everything was black, a pool of night rising from the floor. That blackness seemed to be beckoning to him. Come, a quiet voice was saying, here is your path, here is your destiny: night, darkness, doom. Yield. Yield, Lord Valentine, Coronal that was, Pontifex that will never be. Yield. And Valentine yielded, for in that moment of bewilderment and paralysis of spirit there was nothing else he could do. He stared into the black pool rising about him, and he allowed himself to fall toward it. Unquestioningly, uncomprehendingly, he plunged into that all-engulfing darkness.

I am dead, he thought. I float now on the breast of the black river that returns me to the Source, and soon I must rise and go ashore and find the road that leads to the Bridge of Farewells; and then will I go across into that place where all life has its beginning and its end.

A strange kind of peace pervaded his soul then, a feeling of wondrous ease and contentment, a powerful sense that all the universe was joined in happy harmony. He felt as though he had come to rest in a cradle, where now he lay warmly swaddled, free at last of the torments of kingship. Ah, how good that was! To lie quietly, and let all turbulence sweep by him! Was this death? Why, then, death was joy!

—You are deceived, my lord. Death is the end of joy.

—Who speaks to me here?

—You know me, my lord.

—Deliamber? Are you dead also? Ah, what a safe kind place death is, old friend!

—You are safe, yes. But not dead.

—It feels much like death to me.

—And have you such thorough experience of death, my lord, that you can speak of it so knowingly?

—What is this, if it is not death?

—Merely a spell, said Deliamber.

—One of yours, wizard?

—No, not mine. But I can bring you from it, if you will permit. Come: awaken. Awaken.

—No, Deliamber! Let me be.

—You must, my lord.

—Must, Valentine said bitterly. Must! Always must! Am I never to rest? Let me stay where I am. This is a place of peace. I have no stomach for war, Deliamber.

—Come, my lord.

—Tell me next that it is my duty to awaken.

—I need not tell you what you know so well. Come.

He opened his eyes, and found himself in midair, lying limply in Lisamon Hultin’s arms. The Amazon carried him as though he were a doll, nestling against the vastness of her breasts. Small wonder he had imagined himself in a cradle, he thought, or floating down the black river! Beside him was Autifon Deliamber, perched on Lisamon’s left shoulder. Valentine perceived the wizardry that had called him back from his swoon: the tips of three of the Vroon’s tentacles were touching him, one to his forehead, one to his cheek, one to his chest.

He said, feeling immensely foolish, “You can put me down now.”

“You are very weak, lordship,” Lisamon rumbled.

“Not quite that weak, I think. Put me down.”

Carefully, as though Valentine were nine hundred years old, Lisamon lowered him to the ground. At once, sweeping waves of dizziness rocked him, and he reached out to lean against the giant woman, who still hovered protectively close by. His teeth were chattering. His heavy robes clung to his damp, clammy skin like shrouds. He feared that if he closed his eyes only for an instant, that pool of darkness would rise up again and engulf him. But he forced himself toward a sort of steadiness, even if it were only a pretense. Old training asserted itself: he could not allow himself to be seen looking dazed and weak, no matter what sort of irrational terrors were roaring through his head.

He felt himself growing calmer after a moment, and looked around. They had taken him from the great hall. He was in some brightly lit corridor inlaid with a thousand intertwined and overlapping Pontifical emblems, the eye-baffling Labyrinth symbol repeated over and over. A mob of people clustered about him, looking anxious and dismayed: Tunigorn, Sleet, Hissune, and Shanamir of his own court, and some of the Pontifex’s staff as well, Hornkast and old Dilifon and behind them half a dozen other bobbing yellow-masked heads.

“Where am I?” Valentine asked.

“Another moment and we’ll be at your chambers, lordship,” Sleet said.

“Have I been unconscious long?”

“Two or three minutes, only. You began to fall, while making your speech. But Hissune caught you, and Lisamon.”

“It was the wine,” Valentine said. “I suppose I had too much, a bowl of this and a bowl of that—”

“You are quite sober now,” Deliamber pointed out. “And it is only a few minutes later.”

“Let me believe it was the wine,” said Valentine, “for a little while longer.” The corridor swung leftward and there appeared before him the great carved door of his suite, chased with gold inlays of the starburst emblem over which his own LVC monogram had been engraved. “Where is Tisana?” he called.

“Here, my lord,” said the dream-speaker, from some distance.

“Good. I want you inside with me. Also Deliamber and Sleet. No one else. Is that clear?”

“May I enter also?” said a voice out of the group of Pontifical officials.

It belonged to a thin-lipped gaunt man with strangely ashen skin, whom Valentine recognized after a moment as Sepulthrove, physician to the Pontifex Tyeveras. He shook his head. “I am grateful for your concern. But I think you are not needed.”

“Such a sudden collapse, my lord—it calls for diagnosis—”

“There’s some wisdom in that,” Tunigorn observed quietly.

Valentine shrugged. “Afterward, then. First let me speak with my advisers, good Sepulthrove. And then you can tap my kneecaps a bit, if you think that it’s necessary. Come— Tisana, Deliamber—”

He swept into his suite with the last counterfeit of regal poise he could muster, feeling a vast relief as the heavy door swung shut on the bustling throng in the corridor. He let out his breath in a long slow gust and dropped down, trembling in the release of tension, on the brocaded couch.

“Lordship?” Sleet said softly.

“Wait. Wait. Just let me be.”

He rubbed his throbbing forehead and his aching eyes. The strain of feigning, out there, that he had made a swift and complete recovery from whatever had happened to him in the banquet hall had been expensive to his spirit. But gradually some of his true strength returned. He looked toward the dream-speaker. The robust old woman, thick-bodied and strong, seemed to him just then to be the fount of all comfort.

“Come, Tisana, sit next to me,” Valentine said.

She settled down beside him and slipped her arm around his shoulders. Yes, he thought. Oh, yes, good! Warmth flowed back into his chilled soul, and the darkness receded. From him rushed a great torrent of love for Tisana, sturdy and reliable and wise, who in the days of his exile had been the first openly to hail him as Lord Valentine, when he had been still content to think of himself as Valentine the juggler. How many times in the years of his restored reign had she shared the mind-opening dream-wine with him, and had taken him in her arms to draw from him the secrets of the turbulent images that came to him in sleep! How often had she given him ease from the weight of kingship!

She said, “I was frightened greatly to see you fall, Lord Valentine, and you know I am not one who frightens easily. You say it was the wine?”

“So I said, out there.”

“But it was not the wine, I think.”

“No. Deliamber thinks it was a spell.”

“Of whose making?” Tisana asked.

Valentine looked to the Vroon. “Well?”

Deliamber displayed a tension that Valentine had only rarely seen the little creature reveal: a troubled coiling and weaving of his innumerable tentacles, a strange glitter in his great yellow eyes, grinding motions of his birdlike beak. “I am at a loss for an answer,” said Deliamber finally. “Just as not all dreams are sendings, so too is it the case that not all spells have makers.”

“Some spells cast themselves, is that it?” Valentine asked.

“Not precisely. But there are spells that arise spontaneously—from within, my lord, within oneself, generated out of the empty places of the soul.”

“What are you saying? That I put an enchantment on myself, Deliamber?”

Tisana said gently, “Dreams—spells—it is all the same thing, Lord Valentine. Certain auguries are making themselves known through you. Omens are forcing themselves into view. Storms are gathering, and these are the early harbingers.”

“You see all that so soon? I had a troubled dream, you know, just before the banquet, and most certainly it was full of stormy omens and auguries and harbingers. But unless I’ve been talking of it in my sleep, I’ve told you nothing of it yet, have I?”

“I think you dreamed of chaos, my lord.”

Valentine stared at her. “How could you know that?”

Shrugging, Tisana said, “Because chaos must come. We all recognize the truth of that. There is unfinished business in the world, and it cries out for finishing.”

“The shapeshifters, you mean,” Valentine muttered.

“I would not presume,” the old woman said, “to advise you on matters of state—”

“Spare me such tact. From my advisers I expect advice, not tact.”

“My realm is only the realm of dreams,” said Tisana.

“I dreamed snow on Castle Mount, and a great earthquake that split the world apart.”

“Shall I speak that dream for you, my lord?”

“How can you speak it, when we haven’t yet had the dream-wine?”

“A speaking’s not a good idea just now,” said Deliamber firmly. “The Coronal’s had visions enough for one night. He’d not be well served by drinking dream-wine now. I think this can easily wait until—”

“That dream needs no wine,” said Tisana. “A child could speak it. Earthquakes? The shattering of the world? Why, you must prepare yourself for hard hours, my lord.”

“What are you saying?”

It was Sleet who replied: “These are omens of war, lordship.”

Valentine swung about and glared at the little man. “War?” he cried. “War? Must I do battle again? I was the first Coronal in eight thousand years to lead an army into the field; must I do it twice?”

“Surely you know, my lord,” said Sleet, “that the war of the restoration was merely the first skirmish of the true war that must be fought, a war that has been in the making for many centuries, a war that I think you know cannot now be avoided.”

“There are no unavoidable wars,” Valentine said.

“Do you think so, my lord?”

The Coronal glowered bleakly at Sleet, but made no response. They were telling him what he had already concluded without their help, but did not wish to hear; and, hearing it anyway, he felt a terrible restlessness invading his soul. After a moment he rose and began to wander silently around the room. At the far end of the chamber was an enormous eerie sculpture, a great thing made of the curved bones of sea dragons, interwoven to meet in the form of the fingers of a pair of clasped upturned hands, or perhaps the interlocking fangs of some colossal demonic mouth. For a long while Valentine stood before it, idly stroking the gleaming polished bone. Unfinished business, Tisana had said. Yes. Yes. The Shapeshifters. Shapeshifters, Metamorphs, Piurivars, call them by whatever name you chose: the true natives of Majipoor, those from whom this wondrous world had been stolen by the settlers from the stars, fourteen thousand years before. For eight years, Valentine thought, I’ve struggled to understand the needs of those people. And I still know nothing at all.

He turned and said, “When I rose to speak, my mind was on what Hornkast the high spokesman just had said: the Coronal is the world, and the world is the Coronal. And suddenly I became Majipoor. Everything that was happening everywhere in the world was sweeping through my soul.”

“You have experienced that before,” Tisana said. “In dreams that I have spoken for you: when you said you saw twenty billion golden threads sprouting from the soil, and you held them all in your right hand. And another dream, when you spread your arms wide, and embraced the world, and—”

“This was different,” Valentine said. “This time the world was falling apart.”

“How so?”

“Literally. Crumbling into fragments. There was nothing left but a sea of darkness—into which I fell—”

“Hornkast spoke the truth,” said Tisana quietly. “You are the world, lordship. Dark knowledge is finding its way to you, and it comes through the air from all the world about you. It is a sending, my lord: not of the Lady, nor of the King of Dreams, but of the world entire.”

Valentine glanced toward the Vroon. “What do you say to that, Deliamber?”

“I have known Tisana fifty years, I think, and I have never yet heard foolishness from her lips.”

“Then there is to be war?”

“I believe the war has already begun,” said Deliamber.

2

Hissune would not soon forgive himself for coming late to the banquet. His first official event since being elevated to Lord Valentine’s staff, and he hadn’t managed to show up on time. That was inexcusable.

Some of it was his sister Ailimoor’s fault. All the while he was trying to get into his fine new formal clothes, she kept running in, fussing with him, adjusting his shoulder chain, worrying about the length and cut of his tunic, finding scuff marks on his brilliantly polished boots that would be invisible to anyone’s eyes but hers. She was fifteen, a very difficult age for girls—all ages seemed to be difficult for girls, Hissune sometimes thought—and these days she tended to be bossy, opinionated, preoccupied with trivial domestic detail.

So in her eagerness to make him perfect for the Coronal’s banquet she helped to make him late. She spent what felt to him like a good twenty minutes simply fiddling with his emblem of office, the little golden starburst epaulet that he was supposed to wear on his left shoulder within the loop of the chain. She moved it endlessly a fraction of an inch this way or that to center it more exactly, until at last she said, “All right. That’ll do. Here, see if you like it.”

She snatched up her old hand-mirror, speckled and rusty where the backing was wearing away, and held it before him. Hissune caught a faint distorted glimpse of himself, looking very unfamiliar, all pomp and splendor, as though decked out for a pageant. The costume felt theatrical, stagy, unreal. And yet he was aware of a new kind of poise and authority seeping inward to his soul from his clothing. How odd, he thought, that a hasty fitting at a fancy Place of Masks tailor could produce such an instant transformation of personality—no longer Hissune the ragged hustling street-boy, no longer Hissune the restless and uncertain young clerk, but now Hissune the popinjay, Hissune the peacock, Hissune the proud companion of the Coronal.

And Hissune the unpunctual. If he hurried, though, he might still reach the Great Hall of the Pontifex on time.

But just then his mother Elsinome returned from work, and there was another small delay. She came into his room, a slight, dark-haired woman, pale and weary-looking, and stared at him in awe and wonder, as though someone had captured a comet and set it loose to whirl about her dismal flat. Her eyes were glowing, her features had a radiance he had never seen before.

“How magnificent you look, Hissune! How splendid!”

He grinned and spun about, better to show off his imperial finery. “It’s almost absurd, isn’t it? I look like a knight just down from Castle Mount!”

“You look like a prince! You look like a Coronal!”

“Ah, yes, Lord Hissune. But I’d need an ermine robe for that, I think, and a fine green doublet, and perhaps a great gaudy starburst pendant on my chest. Yet this is good enough for the moment, eh, mother?”

They laughed; and, for all her weariness, she seized him and swung him about in a wild little three-step dance. Then she released him and said, “But it grows late. You should have been off to the feast by this time!”

“I should have been, yes.” He moved toward the door. “How strange all this is, eh, mother? To be going off to dine at the Coronal’s table—to sit at his elbow—to journey with him on the grand processional—to dwell on Castle Mount—”

“So very strange, yes,” said Elsinome quietly.

They all lined up—Elsinome, Ailimoor, his younger sister Maraune—and solemnly Hissune kissed them, and squeezed their hands, and sidestepped them when they tried to hug him, fearing they would rumple his robes; and he saw them staring at him again as though he were some godlike being, or at the very least the Coronal himself. It was quite as if he were no longer one of this family, or as if he never had been, but had descended from the sky to strut about these dreary rooms for a little while this afternoon. At times he almost felt that way himself—that he had not spent these eighteen years of his life in a few dingy rooms in the first ring of the Labyrinth, but indeed was and always had been Hissune of the Castle, knight and initiate, frequenter of the royal court, connoisseur of all its pleasures.

Folly, Madness. You must always remember who you are, he told himself, and where you started from.

But it was hard not to keep dwelling on the transformation that had come over their lives, he thought, while he was making his way down the endless spiraling staircase to the street. So much had changed. Once he and his mother both had worked the streets of the Labyrinth, she begging crowns from passing gentry for her hungry children, he rushing up to tourists and insistently offering to guide them, for half a royal or so, through the scenic wonders of the underground city. And now he was the Coronal’s young protege, and she, through his new connections, was steward of wines at the cafe of the Court of Globes. All achieved by luck, by extraordinary and improbable luck.

Or was it only luck? he wondered. That time so many years back, when he was ten and had thrust his services as a guide upon that tall fair-haired man, it had been convenient indeed for him that the stranger was none other than the Coronal Lord Valentine, overthrown and exiled and in the Labyrinth to win the support of the Pontifex in his reconquest of the throne.

But that in itself might not have led anywhere. Hissune often asked himself what it was about him that had caught Lord Valentine’s fancy, that caused the Coronal to remember him and have him located after the restoration, and be taken from the streets to work in the House of Records, and now to be summoned into the innermost sphere of his administration. His irreverence, perhaps. His quips, his cool, casual manner, his lack of awe for coronals and pontifexes, his ability, even at ten, to look out for himself. That must have impressed Lord Valentine. Those Castle Mount knights, Hissune thought, are all so polite, so dainty-mannered: I must have seemed more alien than a Ghayrog to him. And yet the Labyrinth is full of tough little boys. Any of them might have been the one who tugged at the Coronal’s sleeve. But I was the one. Luck. Luck.

He emerged into the dusty little plaza in front of his house. Before him lay the narrow curving streets of the Guadeloom Court district where he had spent all the days of his life; above him rose the decrepit buildings, thousands of years old and lopsided with age, that formed the boundary palisade of his world. Under the harsh white lights, much too bright, almost crackling in their electric intensity—all this ring of the Labyrinth was bathed in that same fierce light, so little like that of the gentle golden-green sun whose rays never reached this city—the flaking gray masonry of the old buildings emanated a terrible weariness, a mineral fatigue. Hissune wondered if he had ever noticed before just how bleak and shabby this place was.

The plaza was crowded. Not many of the people of Guadeloom Court cared to spend their evenings penned up in their dim little flats, and so they flocked down here to mill aimlessly about in a kind of random patternless promenade. And as Hissune in his shimmering new clothes made his way through that promenade, it seemed that everyone that he had ever known was out there glaring at him, glowering, snickering, scowling. He saw Vanimoon, who was his own age to the hour and had once seemed almost like a brother to him, and Vanimoon’s slender almond-eyed little sister, not so little anymore, and Heulan, and Heulan’s three great hulking brothers, and Nikkilone, and tiny squinch-faced Ghisnet, and the beady-eyed Vroon who sold candied ghumba root, and Confalume the pickpocket, and the old Ghayrog sisters that everyone thought were really Metamorphs, which Hissune had never believed, and this one and that one and more. All staring, all silently asking him, Why are you putting on such airs, Hissune, why this pomp, why this splendor?

He moved uneasily across the plaza, miserably aware that the banquet must be almost about to begin and he had an enormous distance downlevel to traverse. And everyone he had ever known stood in his way, staring at him.

Vanimoon was the first to cry out. “Where are you going, Hissune? To a costume ball?”

“He’s off to the Isle, to play ninesticks with the Lady!”

“No, he’s going to hunt sea-dragons with the Pontifex!”

“Let me by,” Hissune said quietly, for they were pressing close upon him now.

“Let him by! Let him by!” they chorused gaily, but they did not move back.

“Where’d you get the fancy clothes, Hissune?” Ghisnet asked.

“Rented them,” Heulan said.

“Stole them, you mean,” said one of Heulan’s brothers.

“Found a drunken knight in an alleyway and stripped him bare!”

“Get out of my way,” said Hissune, holding his temper in check with more than a little effort. “I have something important to do.”

“Something important! Something important!”

“He has an audience with the Pontifex!”

“The Pontifex is going to make Hissune a Duke!”

“Duke Hissune! Prince Hissune!”

“Why not Lord Hissune?”

“Lord Hissune! Lord Hissune!”

There was an ugly edge to their voices. Ten or twelve of them ringed him, pushing inward. Resentment and jealousy ruled them now. This flamboyant outfit of his, the shoulder chain, the epaulet, the boots, the cloak—it was too much for them, an arrogant way of underscoring the gulf that had opened between him and them. In another moment they’d be plucking at his tunic, tugging at the chain. Hissune felt the beginnings of panic. It was folly to try to reason with a mob, worse folly to attempt to force his way through. And of course it was hopeless to expect imperial proctors to be patrolling a neighborhood like this. He was on his own.

Vanimoon, who was the closest, reached toward Hissune’s shoulder as though to give him a shove. Hissune backed away, but not before Vanimoon had left a grimy track along the pale green fabric of his cloak. Sudden astonishing fury surged through him. “Don’t touch me again!” he yelled, angrily making the sign of the sea dragon at Vanimoon. “Don’t any of you touch me!”

With a mocking laugh Vanimoon clawed for him a second time. Swiftly Hissune caught him by the wrist, clamping down with crushing force.

“Hoy! Let go!” Vanimoon grunted.

Instead Hissune pulled Vanimoon’s arm upward and back, and spun him roughly around. Hissune had never been much of a fighter—he was too small and lithe for that, and preferred to rely on speed and wits—but he could be strong enough when anger kindled him. Now he felt himself throbbing with violent energy. In a low tense voice he said, “If I have to, Vanimoon, I’ll break it. I don’t want you or anybody else touching me.”

“You’re hurting me!”

“Will you keep your hands to yourself?”

“Man can’t even stand to be teased—”

Hissune twisted Vanimoon’s arm as far up as it would go. “I’ll pull it right off you if I have to.”

“Let—go—”

“If you’ll keep your distance.”

“All right. All right!”

Hissune released him and caught his breath. His heart was pounding and he was soaked with sweat: he did not dare to wonder how he must look. After all of Ailimoor’s endless fussing over him, too.

Vanimoon, stepping back, sullenly rubbed his wrist. “Afraid I’ll soil his fancy clothes. Doesn’t want common people’s dirt on them.”

“That’s right. Now get out of my way. I’m late enough already.”

“For the Coronal’s banquet, I suppose?”

“Exactly. I’m late for the Coronal’s banquet.”

Vanimoon and the others gaped at him, their expressions hovering midway between scorn and awe. Hissune pushed his way past them and strode across the plaza.

The evening, he thought, was off to a very bad start.

3

On a day in high summer when the sun hung all but motionless over Castle Mount, the Coronal Lord Valentine rode out joyously into the flower-shimmering meadows below the Castle’s southern wing.

He went alone, not even taking with him his consort the Lady Carabella. The members of his council objected strongly to his going anywhere unguarded, even within the Castle, let alone venturing outside the sprawling perimeter of the royal domain. Whenever the issue arose, Elidath pounded hand against fist and Tunigorn rose up tall as though prepared to block Valentine’s departure with his own body, and little Sleet turned positively black in the face with fury and reminded the Coronal that his enemies had succeeded in overthrowing him once, and might yet again.

“Ah, surely I’d be safe anywhere on Castle Mount!” Valentine insisted.

But always they had had their way, until today. The safety of the Coronal of Majipoor, they insisted, was paramount. And so whenever Lord Valentine went riding, Elidath or Tunigorn or perhaps Stasilaine rode always beside him, as they had since they were boys together, and half a dozen members of the Coronal’s guard lurked a respectful distance behind.

This time, though, Valentine had somehow eluded them all. He was unsure how he had managed it: but when the overpowering urge to ride had come upon him in midmorning he simply strode into the south-wing stables, saddled his mount without the help of a groom, and set out across the green porcelain cobblestones of a strangely empty Dizimaule Plaza, passing swiftly under the great arch and into the lovely fields that flanked the Grand Calintane Highway. No one stopped him. No one called out to him. It was as though some wizardry had rendered him, invisible.

Free, if only for an hour or two! The Coronal threw his head back and laughed as he had not laughed in a long while, and slapped his mount’s flank, and sped across the meadows, moving so swiftly that the hooves of his great purple beast seemed scarcely to touch the myriad blossoms all about.

Ah, this was the life!

He glanced over his shoulder. The fantastic bewildering pile of the Castle was diminishing rapidly behind him, though it still seemed immense at this distance, stretching over half the horizon, an incomprehensibly huge edifice of some forty thousand rooms that clung like some vast monster to the summit of the Mount. He could not remember any occasion since his restoration to the throne when he had been out of that castle without his bodyguard. Not even once.

Well, he was out of it now. Valentine looked off to his left, where the thirty-mile-high crag that was Castle Mount sloped away at a dizzying angle, and saw the pleasure-city of High Morpin gleaming below, a webwork of airy golden threads. Ride down there, spend a day at the games? Why not? He was free! Ride on beyond, if he chose, and stroll in the gardens of Tolingar Barrier, among the halatingas and tanigales and sithereels, and come back with a yellow alabandina flower in his cap as a cockade? Why not? The day was his. Ride to Furible in time for the feeding-time of the stone birds, ride to Stee and sip golden wine atop Thimin Tower, ride to Bombifale or Peritole or Banglecode—

His mount seemed equal to any such labor. It carried him hour after hour without fatigue. When he came to High Morpin he tethered it at Confalume Fountain, where shafts of tinted water slender as spears shot hundreds of feet into the air while maintaining, by some ancient magic, their rigid shapes, and on foot he strode along the streets of closely woven golden cable until he came to the place of the mirror slides, where he and Voriax had tested their skills so often when they were boys. But when he went out on the glittering slides no one took any notice of him, as though they felt it rude to stare at a Coronal doing the slides, or as though he were still somehow cloaked by that strange invisibility. That seemed odd, but he was not greatly troubled by it. When he was done with the slides he thought he might go on to the power tunnels or the juggernauts, but then it seemed just as pleasing to continue his journey, and a moment later he was upon his mount once more, and riding on to Bombifale. In that ancient and most lovely of cities, where curving walls of the deepest burnt-orange sandstone were topped with pale towers tapering to elegant points, they had come to him one day long ago when he had been on holiday alone, five of them, his friends, and found him in a tavern of vaulted onyx and polished alabaster, and when he greeted them with surprise and laughter they responded by kneeling to him and making the starburst sign and crying, “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!” To which his first thought was that he was being mocked, for he was not the king but the king’s younger brother, and he knew he never would be king, and did not want to be. And though he was a man who did not get angry easily, he grew angry then, that his friends should intrude on him with this cruel nonsense. But then he saw how pale their faces were, how strange their eyes, and his anger left him, and grief and fear entered his soul: and that was how he learned that Voriax his brother was dead and he had been named Coronal in his place. In Bombifale this day ten years later, it seemed to Valentine that every third man he met had the face of Voriax, black-bearded and hard-eyed and ruddy-faced, and that troubled him, so he left Bombifale quickly.

He did not stop again, for there was so much to see, so many hundreds of miles to traverse. He went on, past one city and another in a serene untroubled way, as if he were floating, as if he were flying. Now and again he had an astounding view from the brink of some precipice of all the Mount spread out below him, its Fifty Cities somehow visible every one at once, and the innumerable foothill towns too, and the Six Rivers, and the broad plain of Alhanroel sweeping off to the faraway Inner Sea—such splendor, such immensity. Majipoor! Surely it was the most beautiful of all the worlds to which mankind had spread in the thousands of years of the great movement outward from Old Earth. And all given into his hand, all placed in his charge, a responsibility from which he would never shrink.

But as he rode onward an unexpected mystery began to impinge upon his soul. The air grew dark and cold, which was strange, for on Castle Mount the climate was forever controlled to yield an eternal balmy springtime. Then something like chill spittle struck him on the cheek, and he searched about for a challenger, and saw none, and was struck again, and again: snow, he realized finally, sweeping hard against him on the breast of the frosty wind. Snow, on Castle Mount? Harsh winds?

And worse: the earth was groaning like a monster in labor. His mount, which had never disobeyed him, now reared back in fear, made a weird whinnying sound, shook its heavy head in slow, ponderous dismay. Valentine heard the booming of distant thunder, and closer at hand a strange cracking noise, and he saw giant furrows appearing in the ground. Everything was madly heaving and churning. An earthquake? The entire Mount was whipping about like a dragon-ship’s mast when the hot dry winds blew from the south. The sky itself, black and leaden, took on sudden weight.

What is this? Oh, good Lady my mother, what is happening on Castle Mount?

Valentine clung desperately to his bucking, panicky animal. The whole world seemed to be shattering, crumbling, sliding, flowing. It was his task to hold it together, clutching its giant continents close against his breast, keeping the seas in their beds, holding back the rivers that rose in ravening fury against the helpless cities—

And he could not sustain it all.

It was too much for him. Mighty forces thrust whole provinces aloft, and set them clashing against their neighbors. Valentine reached forth to keep them in their places, wishing he had iron hoops with which to bind them. But he could not do it. The land shivered and rose and split, and black clouds of dust covered the face of the sun, and he was powerless to quell that awesome convulsion. One man alone could not bind this vast planet and halt its sundering. He called his comrades to his aid. “Lisamon! Elidath!”

No response. He called again, and again, but his voice was lost in the booming and the grinding.

All stability had gone from the world. It was as though he were riding the mirror slides in High Morpin, where you had to dance and hop lively to stay upright as the whirling slides tilted and jerked, but that was a game and this was true chaos, the roots of the world uprooted. The heaving tossed him down and rolled him over and over, and he dug his fingers fiercely into the soft yielding earth to keep from sliding into the crevasses that opened beside him. Out of those yawning cracks came terrifying sounds of laughter, and a purple glow that seemed to rise from a sun that the earth had swallowed. Angry faces floated in the air above him, faces he almost recognized, but they shifted about disconcertingly as he studied them, eyes becoming noses, noses becoming ears. Then behind those nightmare faces he saw another that he knew, shining dark hair, gentle warm eyes. The Lady of the Isle, the sweet mother.

“It is enough,” she said. “Awaken now, Valentine!”

“And am I dreaming, then?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“Then I should stay, and learn what I can from this dream!”

“You have learned enough, I think. Awaken now.”

Yes. It was enough: any more such knowledge might make an end of him. As he had been taught long ago, he brought himself upward from this unexpected sleep and sat up, blinking, struggling to shed his grogginess and confusion. Images of titanic cataclysm still reverberated in his soul; but gradually he perceived that all was peaceful here. He lay on a richly brocaded couch in a high-vaulted room all green and gold. What had halted the earthquake? Where was his mount? Who had brought him here? Ah, they had! Beside him crouched a pale, lean, white-haired man with a ragged scar running the length of one cheek. Sleet. And Tunigorn standing just to the rear, frowning, heavy eyebrows contracting into a single furry ridge. “Calm, calm, calm,” Sleet was saying. “It’s all right, now. You’re awake.”

Awake? A dream, then, only a dream?

So it would seem. He was not on Castle Mount at all. There had been no snowstorm, no earthquake, no clouds of dust blotting out the sun. A dream, yes! But such a terrible dream, frighteningly vivid and compelling, so powerful that he found it difficult now to return to reality.

“Where is this place?” Valentine asked.

“Labyrinth, lordship.”

Where? The Labyrinth? What, then, had he been spirited away from Castle Mount while he slept? Valentine felt sweat bursting from his brow. The Labyrinth? Ah, yes, yes. The truth of it closed on him like a hand on his throat. The Labyrinth, yes. He remembered, now. The state visit, of which this was, the Divine be thanked, the final night. That ghastly banquet still to endure. He could not hide from it any longer. The Labyrinth, the Labyrinth, the confounded Labyrinth: he was in it, down in the bottommost level of all. The walls of the suite glowed with handsome murals of the Castle, the Mount, the Fifty Cities: scenes so lovely that they were a mockery to him now. So distant from Castle Mount, so far from the sun’s sweet warmth—

Ah, what a sour business, he thought, to awaken from a dream of destruction and calamity, only to find yourself in the most dismal place in the world!

4

Six hundred miles east of the brilliant crystalline city of Dulorn, in the marshy valley known as Prestimion Vale, where a few hundred families of Ghayrogs raised lusavender and rice on widely scattered plantations, it was getting to be the midyear harvest season. The glossy, swollen, black lusavender pods, nearly ripe, hung in thick clusters at the ends of curving stems that rose from the half-submerged fields.

For Aximaan Threysz, the oldest and shrewdest of the lusavender farmers of Prestimion Vale, there was an excitement about this harvest like nothing she had felt in decades. The experiment in protoplast augmentation that she had begun three seasons back under the guidance of the government agricultural agent was reaching its culmination now. This season she had given her entire plantation over to the new kind of lusavender: and there were the pods, twice normal size, ready to be stripped! No one else in the Vale had dared to take the risk, not until Aximaan Threysz had checked things out. And now she had; and soon her success would be confirmed; and they would all weep, oh, yes! when she came to market a week ahead of everyone else with double her usual volume of seed!

As she stood deep in mud by the edge of her fields, pressing her finger-ridges into the closest pods and trying to determine how soon to start the picking, one of her eldest son’s boys came running up with a message: “Father says to tell you he’s just heard in town that the agricultural agent’s on his way from Mazadone! He’s reached Helkaplod already. Tomorrow he’ll ride to Sijaneel.”

“Then he’ll be in the Vale by Twoday,” she said. “Good. Perfect!” Her forked tongue began to flicker. “Go, child, run back to your father. Tell him we’ll hold the feast for the agent on Seaday and we’ll begin the harvest on Fourday. And I want the whole family to gather in the plantation house in half an hour. Go, now! Run.”

The plantation had been in the family of Aximaan Threysz since Lord Confalume’s time. It covered an irregularly triangular area that stretched for five miles or so along the banks of Havilbove Fluence, jigged in a southeasterly way down to the outskirts of Mazadone Forest Preserve, and swung by roundabout curves back toward the river to the north. Within that zone, Aximaan Threysz ruled as lord absolute over her five sons and nine daughters, her uncountable grandchildren, and the twenty-odd Liimen and Vroons who were her farmhands. When Aximaan Threysz said it was seedtime, they went out and seeded. When Aximaan Threysz said it was harvest time, they went out and reaped. At the great house at the edge of the androdragma grove, dinner was served at the time Aximaan Threysz came to table, whenever that time happened to be. Even the family sleeping schedules were subject to Aximaan Threysz’s decrees: for Ghayrogs are hibernators, but she could not have the whole family asleep at once. The eldest son knew he must always be awake during the first six weeks of his mother’s annual winter rest; the eldest daughter took command for the remaining six weeks. Aximaan Threysz assigned sleep-times to the other family members according to her sense of what was appropriate to the plantation’s needs. No one ever questioned her. Even when she was young—an impossibly long time ago, when Ossier was Pontifex and Lord Tyeveras had the Castle—she had been the one to whom all others turned, even her father, even her mate, in time of crisis. She had outlived both of those, and some of her offspring as well, and many a Coronal had come and gone on Castle Mount, and still Aximaan Threysz went on and on. Her thick scaly hide had lost its high gloss and was purplish with age now, the writhing fleshy serpents of her hair had faded from jet black to pale gray, her chilly unblinking green eyes were clouded and milky, but yet she moved unceasingly through the routines of the farm.

Nothing of any value could be raised on her land except rice and lusavender, and even those were not easy. The rainstorms of the far north found easy access to Dulorn Province down the great funnel of the Rift, and, though the city of Dulorn itself lay in a dry zone, the territory to its west, amply watered and well drained, was fertile and rich. But the district around Prestimion Vale on the eastern side of the Rift was another sort of place entirely, dank and swampy, its soil a heavy bluish muck. With careful timing, though, it was possible to plant rice at the end of winter just ahead of the spring floods, and to put in lusavender in late spring and again at the end of autumn. No one in the region knew the rhythm of the seasons better than Aximaan Threysz, and only the most rash of farmers would set his seedlings out before word had come that she had begun her planting.

Imperious though she was, overwhelming in her prestige and authority, Aximaan Threysz nevertheless had one trait that the people of the Vale found incomprehensible: she deferred to the provincial agricultural agent as though he were the fount of all knowledge and she the merest apprentice. Two or three times a year the agent came out from the provincial capital of Mazadone, riding a circuit through the swamplands, and his first stop in the Vale was always Aximaan Threysz’s plantation. She housed him in the great house, she breached the casks of fireshower wine and brandied niyk, she sent her grandsons off to Havilbove Fluence to catch the tasty little hiktigans that scurried between the rocks of the rapids, she ordered the frozen bidlak steaks to be thawed and roasted over logs of aromatic thwale. And when the feasting was done she drew the agent aside and talked far into the night with him of such things as fertilizers and seedling grafts and harvesting machinery, while her daughters Heynok and Jarnok sat by, taking down notes of every word.

It mystified everyone that Aximaan Threysz, who surely knew more about the planting of lusavender than anyone who had ever lived, would care a straw for what some little government employee could tell her. But her family knew why. “We have our ways, and we become set in our ways,” she often said. “We do what we have done before, because it has worked for us before. We plant our seeds, we tend our seedlings, we watch over the ripening, we harvest our crop, and then we begin all over in the same way. And if each crop is no smaller than the crop before, we think we are doing well. But in fact we are failing, if we merely equal what we have done before. There is no standing still in this world: to stand still is to sink into the mud.”

So it was that Aximaan Threysz subscribed to the agricultural journals, and sent her grandchildren off now and then to the university, and listened most carefully to what the provincial agent might have to say. And year by year the method of her farming underwent small changes, and year by year the sacks of lusavender seeds that Aximaan Threysz shipped off to market in Mazadone were greater in number than the year before, and the shining grains of rice were heaped ever higher in her storehouses. For there was always some better way of doing things to be learned, and Aximaan Threysz made sure she learned it. “We are Majipoor,” she said again and again. “The great cities rest on foundations of grain. Without us, Ni-moya and Pidruid and Khyntor and Piliplok would be wastelands. And the cities grow ever larger every year: so we must work ever harder to feed them, is that not so? We have no choice in that: it is the will of the Divine. Is that not so?”

She had outlasted fifteen or twenty agents by now. They came out as young men, brimming over with the latest notions but often shy about offering them to her. “I don’t know what I could possibly teach you,” they liked to tell her. “I’m the one who should be learning from you, Aximaan Threysz!” So she had to go through the same routine again and again, putting them at their ease, convincing them that she was sincerely interested in hearing of the latest techniques.

It was always a nuisance when the old agent retired and some youngster took over. As she moved deeper into vast old age it became ever harder to establish any sort of useful relationship with the new ones until several seasons had gone by. But that had not been a problem when Caliman Hayn had turned up two years ago. He was a young human, thirty or forty or fifty years old—anyone short of seventy seemed young to Aximaan Threysz these days—with a curiously blunt, offhand manner that was much to her liking. He showed no awe for her and did not seem interested in flattering her. “They tell me you are the farmer most willing to try new things,” he said brusquely, no more than ten minutes after they had met. “What would you say to a process that can double the size of lusavender seeds without harming their flavor?”

“I would say that I am being gulled,” she said. “It sounds considerably too good to be true.”

“Nevertheless the process exists.”

“Does it, now?”

“We’re ready to put it into limited experimental use. I see by my predecessors’ files that you’re known for your willingness to experiment.”

“So I am,” said Aximaan Threysz. “What sort of thing is this?”

It was, he said, something called protoplast augmentation, which involved using enzymes to digest the cell walls of plants to give access to the genetic material within. That material then could undergo manipulation, after which the cellular matter, the protoplast, was placed in a culture medium and allowed to regenerate its cell wall. From that single cell an entire new plant with greatly improved characteristics could be grown.

“I thought such skills were lost on Majipoor thousands of years ago,” Aximaan Threysz said.

“Lord Valentine has been encouraging some revival of interest in the ancient sciences.”

“Lord Valentine?”

“The Coronal, yes,” said Caliman Hayn.

“Ah, the Coronal!” Aximaan Threysz looked away. Valentine? Valentine? She would have said the Coronal’s name was Voriax; but a moment’s thought and she recalled that Voriax was dead. Yes, and a Lord Valentine had replaced him, she had heard, and as she gave it more thought she remembered that something odd had happened to that Valentine—was he the one who had had his body exchanged with another man’s? Probably that was the one. But such people as Coronals meant very little to Aximaan Threysz, who had not left Prestimion Vale in twenty or thirty years and to whom Castle Mount and its Coronals were so far away that they might just as well be mythical. What mattered to Aximaan Threysz was the growing of rice and lusavender.

The imperial botanical laboratories, Caliman Hayn told her, had bred an enhanced clone of lusavender that needed field research under normal farming conditions. He invited Aximaan Threysz to collaborate in this research—in return for which he would agree not to offer the new plant to anyone else in Prestimion Vale until she had had the chance to establish it in all her fields.

It was irresistible. She received from him a, packet of astonishingly immense lusavender seeds, great shiny things as big around as a Skandar’s eye, and planted them in a remote corner of her land, where there was no likelihood of their cross-pollinating with her normal lusavenders. The seeds sprouted rapidly and from them came plants that differed from the usual kind only in having stems of a thickness two or three times normal. When they flowered, though, the ruffled purple blossoms were enormous, as broad as saucers, and the flowers brought forth pods of awesome length, that at harvest time yielded huge quantities of the giant seeds. Aximaan Threysz was tempted to use them for the autumn planting, and cover all her acreage with the new kind of lusavender in order to reap an amazing bumper crop next winter. But she could not, for she had agreed to turn most of the oversize seed over to Caliman Hayn for laboratory study in Mazadone. He left her enough to plant perhaps a fifth of her land. This season, however, she was instructed to mix the augmented plants among the normal ones to induce interbreeding: the augmented characteristics were thought to be dominant, but that had never been tested on so large a scale.

Though Aximaan Threysz forbade her family to speak of the experiment in Prestimion Vale, it was impossible for long to keep the other farmers from learning of it. The thick-stemmed second-generation plants that sprang up everywhere on her plantation could hardly be concealed, and in one way and another, news of what Aximaan Threysz was doing spread through the Vale. Curious neighbors wangled invitations and stared at the new lusavender in amazement.

But they were suspicious. “Plants like that, they’ll suck all the nourishment from the soil in two or three years,” some said. “She keeps it up, she’ll turn her place into a desert.” Others thought the giant seeds surely would yield tasteless or bitter lusavender-meal. A few argued that Aximaan Threysz generally knew what she was doing. But even they were content to let her be the pioneer.

At winter’s end she harvested her crop: normal seeds, which were sent off to market as usual, and giant ones, which were bagged and set aside for planting. The third season would tell the tale, for some of the big seeds were of the pure clone and some, probably most, were hybrids between normal and augmented lusavender; and it remained to be seen what sort of plants the hybrid seeds would produce.

In late winter came the time for planting rice, before the floods arrived. When that was done, the higher and drier lands of the plantation received the lusavender seeds; and all through the spring and summer she watched the thick stems rising, the huge flowers unfolding, the heavy pods elongating and turning dark. From time to time she broke open a pod and peered at the soft green seeds. They were large, no question about that. But their flavor? What if they had no flavor, or a foul one? She had gambled an entire season’s production on that.

Well, the answer would be at hand soon enough.

On Starday came word that the agricultural agent was approaching, and would arrive at the plantation, as expected, on Twoday. But the same report brought puzzling and disturbing news: for the agent who was coming was not Caliman Hayn, but someone named Yerewain Noor. Aximaan Threysz could not understand that. Hayn was too young to have retired. And it bothered her to have him vanish just as the protoplast experiment was nearing its end.

Yerewain Noor turned out to be even younger than Hayn, and annoyingly callow. He began at once to tell her how honored he was to meet her, with all the usual rhetorical flourishes, but she cut him off.

“Where’s the other man?” she demanded.

No one seemed to know, Noor said. Lamely he explained thai Hayn had gone off without warning three months ago, saying nothing to anyone and dumping an enormous administrative mess on the rest of the department. “We’re still figuring it all out. Evidently he was mixed up in a bunch of experimental studies, but we don’t know what sort or with whom, and—”

“One of them took place here,” said Aximaan Threysz coldly. “Field testing of protoplast-augmented lusavender.”

Noor groaned. “The Divine spare me! How many more of Hayn’s little private projects am I going to stumble into? Protoplast-augmented lusavender, is it?”

“You sound as if you’ve never heard the term.”

“I’ve heard it, yes. But I can’t say I know much about it.”

“Come with me,” Aximaan Threysz said, and marched off, past the paddies where the rice now stood hip-high, and on into the lusavender fields. Anger sped her stride: the young agricultural agent was hard pressed to match her pace. As she went she told him about the packet of giant seeds Hayn had brought her, the planting of the new clone on her land, the interbreeding with normal lusavender, the generation of hybrids now coming to ripening. In a moment more they reached the first rows of lusavender. Suddenly she halted, appalled, horrified.

“The Lady protect us all!” she cried.

“What is it?”

“Look! Look!”

For once Aximaan Threysz’s sense of timing had failed her. Most unexpectedly the hybrid lusavender had begun to throw seed, two weeks or more ahead of the likely day. Under the fierce summer sun the great pods were starting to split, cracking open with an ugly sound like the snapping of bones. Each, as it popped, hurled its huge seeds almost with the force of bullets in every direction; they flew thirty or forty feet through the air and disappeared in the thick muck that covered the flooded fields. There was no halting that process: within an hour all the pods would be open, the harvest would be lost.

But that was far from the worst of it.

Forth from the pods came not only seeds but a fine brown powder that Aximaan Threysz knew only too well. Wildly she rushed into the field, paying no attention to the seeds that crashed with stinging impact against her scaly skin. Seizing a pod that had not yet split, she broke it open, and a cloud of the powder rose toward her face. Yes. Yes. Lusavender smut! Each pod held at least a cupful of spores; and as pod after pod yielded to the heat of the day, the brown spores hovering over the field became a visible stain on the air, until they were swept away by the lightest of breezes.

Yerewain Noor knew what was happening too. “Call out your field hands!” he cried. “You’ve got to torch this stuff!”

“Too late,” said Aximaan Threysz in a sepulchral voice. “No hope now. Too late, too late, too late. What can hold the spores back now?” Her land was infected beyond repair. And in an hour the spores would be spread all through the Vale. “It’s all over with us, can’t you see?”

“But lusavender smut was wiped out long ago!” Noor said in a foolish voice.

Aximaan Threysz nodded. She remembered it well: the fires, the sprayings, the breeding of smut-resistant clones, the roguing out of any plant that held the genetic predisposition to harbor the lethal fungus. Seventy, eighty, ninety years ago: how they had worked to rid the world of that blight! And here it was again, in these hybrid plants. These plants alone in all Majipoor, she thought, were capable of providing a home for lusavender smut. Her plants, so lovingly grown, so skillfully tended. By her own hand had she brought the smut back into the world, and set it free to blight her neighbors’ crops.

“Hayn!” she roared. “Hayn, where are you? What have you done to me?”

She wished she could die, now, here, before what was about to happen could unfold. But she knew she would not be that lucky; for long life had been her blessing, and now it was her curse. The popping of the pods resounded in her ears like the guns of an advancing army, rampaging across the Vale. She had lived one year too long, she thought: long enough to see the end of the world.

5

Downward Hissune traveled, feeling rumpled and sweaty and apprehensive, through passageways and liftshafts he had known all his life, and soon the shabby world of the outermost ring was far behind him. He descended through level after level of wonders and marvels to which he had not given a second glance in years: Court of Columns, Hall of Winds, Place of Masks, Court of Pyramids, Court of Globes, the Arena, House of Records. People came here from Castle Mount or Alaisor or Stoien, or even from impossibly distant and supposedly fabulous Ni-moya on the other continent, and wandered around dazed and stupefied, lost in admiration of the ingenuity that had devised and constructed such bizarre architectural splendors so far underground. But to Hissune it was only the drab and dreary old Labyrinth. For him it had neither charm or mystery: it was simply his home.

The big pentagonal plaza in front of the House of Records marked the lower limit of the public zone of the Labyrinth. Below, all was reserved for government officials. Hissune passed beneath the great green-glowing screen on the wall of the House of Records that listed all the Pontifexes, all the Coronals—the two rows of inscriptions stretching up virtually beyond the reach of the keenest eye, somewhere far up there the names of Dvorn and Melikand and Barhold and Stiamot of thousands of years ago, and down here the entries for Kinniken and Ossier and Tyeveras, Malibor and Voriax and Valentine—and on the far side of the imperial roster Hissune presented his credentials to the puffy-faced masked Hjorts who kept the gateway, and down he went into the deepest realm of the Labyrinth. Past the warrens and burrows of the middle bureaucracy, past the courts of the high ministers, past the tunnels that led to the great ventilating systems on which all this depended. Again and again he was stopped at checkpoints and asked to identify himself. Here in the imperial sector they took matters of security very seriously. Somewhere in these depths the Pontifex himself had his lair—a huge spherical glass globe, so it was said, in which the crazy old monarch sat enthroned amidst the network of life-support mechanisms that had kept him alive far past his time. Did they fear assassins? Hissune wondered. If what he had heard was true, it would be merely the Divine’s own mercy to pull the plug on the old Pontifex and let poor Tyeveras return at last to the Source: Hissune could not understand what possible reason there could be to keep him living on like that, decade after decade, in such madness, in such senility.

At last, breathless and frayed, Hissune arrived at the threshold of the Great Hall in the uttermost depths of the Labyrinth. He was hideously late, perhaps an hour.

Three colossal shaggy Skandars in the uniform of the Coronal’s guard barred his way. Hissune, shriveling under the fierce supercilious stares of the gigantic four-armed beings, had to fight back the impulse to drop to his knees and beg their forgiveness. Somehow he regained a shred or two of his self-respect, and, trying his best to stare back just as superciliously—no easy chore, when he had to meet the gaze of creatures nine feet high—he announced himself as a member of Lord Valentine’s staff, and an invited guest.

He half expected them to burst into guffaws and swat him away like some little buzzing insect. But no: gravely they examined his epaulet, and consulted some documents they held, and favored him with great sweeping bows, and sent him onward through the huge brass-bound doorway.

Finally! The Coronal’s banquet!

Just within the door stood a resplendently garbed Hjort with great goggling golden eyes and bizarre orange-daubed whiskers sprouting from his rough-skinned grayish face. This astonishing-looking individual was Vinorkis, the Coronal’s majordomo, who saluted now with a great flourish and cried, “Ah! The Initiate Hissune!”

“Not yet an initiate,” Hissune tried to tell him, but the Hjort had already swung grandly about and was on his way down the center aisle, not looking back. With numb-legged strides Hissune followed him.

He felt impossibly conspicuous. There must have been five thousand people in the room, seated at round tables that held a dozen or so each, and he imagined that every eye was fastened on him. To his horror, he was no more than twenty paces into the room when he heard laughter beginning to rise, softly at first, then more heartily, and then waves of mirth that rolled from one side of the room to the other, crashing against him with stunning impact. He had never before heard such a vast roaring noise: it was the way he imagined the sea to sound as it flailed some wild northern coast.

The Hjort marched on and on, for what seemed like a mile and a half, and Hissune grimly marched on behind him through that ocean of merriment, wishing he were half an inch high. But after a while he realized that these people were laughing not at him but at a pack of dwarfish acrobats who were attempting with deliberate clownishness to form a human pyramid, and he grew less uneasy. Then the high dais came into view, and there was Lord Valentine himself beckoning to him, smiling, indicating the empty seat close by his side. Hissune thought he would weep from sheer relief. Everything was going to be all right after all.

“Your lordship!” Vinorkis boomed. “The Initiate Hissune!”

Hissune sank wearily and gratefully into his seat, just as an enormous round of applause for the acrobats, who were done with their act, resounded in the hall. A steward handed him a brimming bowl of some glistening golden wine, and as he put it to his lips, others around the table lifted their own bowls in a salute of welcome. Yesterday morning, during the brief and astonishing conversation with Lord Valentine in which the Coronal had invited him to join his staff on Castle Mount, Hissune had seen a few of these people at a distance, but there had been no time for introductions. Now they were actually giving him greeting—him!—and introducing themselves. But they needed no introduction, for these were the heroes of Lord Valentine’s glorious war of restoration, and everyone knew who they were.

That huge warrior-woman sitting beside him was surely Lisamon Hultin, the Coronal’s personal bodyguard, who, so the story went, once had cut Lord Valentine free of the belly of a sea dragon after he had been swallowed. And the amazingly pale-skinned little man with the white hair and the scarred face was, Hissune knew, the famous Sleet, juggling tutor to Lord Valentine in the days of exile; and the keen-eyed, heavy-browed man was the master archer Tunigorn of Castle Mount; and the small many-tentacled Vroon had to be the wizard Deliamber; and that man hardly older than Hissune himself, with the freckled face, was very likely the onetime herdboy Shanamir; and that slender, dignified Hjort must be Grand Admiral Asenhart—yes, these were the famous ones, and Hissune, who once had thought himself immune to any sort of awe, found himself very much awed indeed to be of their company now.

Immune to awe? Why, he had once walked up to Lord Valentine himself and shamelessly extorted half a royal from him for a tour of the Labyrinth, and three crowns more to find him lodgings in the outer ring. He had felt no awe then. Coronals and Pontifexes were simply men with more power and money than ordinary people, and they attained their thrones through the good luck of being born into the Castle Mount aristocracy and making their way through the ranks with just the right happy accidents to take them to the top. You didn’t even have to be particularly smart to be a Coronal, Hissune had noticed years ago. After all, just in the last twenty years or so, Lord Malibor had gone off to harpoon sea dragons and had stupidly gotten himself eaten by one, and Lord Voriax had died just as foolishly from a stray bolt that struck him down while he was out hunting in the forest, and his brother Lord Valentine, who was reputed to be fairly intelligent, had been witless enough to go drinking and carousing with the son of the King of Dreams, thereby letting himself be drugged and wiped clean of his memory and dumped from his throne. Feel awe for such as those? Why, in the Labyrinth any seven-year-old who conducted himself with such casual regard for his own welfare would be regarded as a hopeless idiot.

But Hissune had observed that some of his early irreverence seemed to have worn away over the years. When one is ten and has lived by one’s wits in the streets since the age of five or six, it is easy enough to thumb one’s nose at power. But he no longer was ten, and he no longer roved the streets. His perspective was a little deeper these days: and he knew it was no small thing to be Coronal of Majipoor, and no easy task. So when Hissune looked toward that broad-shouldered, golden-haired man, seeming both regal and gentle at once, who wore the green doublet and ermine robe of the world’s second highest office, and when he considered that that man, only ten feet from him, was the Coronal Lord Valentine, who had chosen him out of all Majipoor to join this group tonight, he felt something very like a shiver traveling down his back, and he admitted finally to himself that what that shiver was was awe: for the office of the kingship, and for the person of Lord Valentine, and for the mysterious chain of happenstance that had brought a mere boy of the Labyrinth into this august company.

He sipped his wine and felt a warm glow spread through his soul. What did the evening’s earlier troubles matter? He was here now, and welcome. Let Vanimoon and Heulan and Ghisnet eat their hearts out with envy! He was here, among the great ones, beginning his ascent toward the summit of the world, and soon he would be attaining heights from which the Vanimoons of his childhood would be altogether invisible.

In moments, though, that sense of well-being was completely gone from him, and he found himself tumbling back into confusion and dismay.

The first thing that went wrong was nothing more than a minor blunder, absurd but forgivable, scarcely his fault at all. Sleet had remarked on the obvious anxiety the Pontifical officials displayed every time they looked toward the Coronal’s table: plainly they were madly fearful that Lord Valentine was not sufficiently enjoying himself. And Hissune, newly radiant with wine and gloriously happy to be at the banquet at last, had brashly blurted out, “They ought to be worried! They know they’d better make a good impression, or they’ll be out in the cold when Lord Valentine becomes Pontifex!”

There were gasps all around the table. Everyone stared at him as though he had uttered some monstrous blasphemy—all but the Coronal, who clamped his lips together in the manner of one who has unexpectedly found a toad in his soup, and turned away.

“Did I say something wrong?” Hissune asked.

“Hush!” Lisamon Hultin whispered fiercely, and the mountainous Amazon woman nudged him urgently in the ribs.

“But is it not so that one day Lord Valentine will be Pontifex? And when that happens, won’t he want to install a staff of his own?”

Lisamon nudged him again, so emphatically that she all but knocked him from his seat. Sleet glared belligerently at him, and Shanamir said in a sharp whisper, “Enough! You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

Hissune shook his head. With a trace of anger showing beneath his confusion he said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain it to you later,” said Shanamir.

Stubbornly Hissune said, “But what have I done? To say that Lord Valentine is going to be Pontifex some day, and—”

With deep frost in his voice Shanamir said, “Lord Valentine does not wish to contemplate the necessity of becoming Pontifex at this time. He particularly does not wish to contemplate it during his dinner. It is something not spoken of in his presence. Do you understand now? Do you?”

“Ah, I do now,” said Hissune miserably.

In his shame he wanted to crawl under the table and hide. But how was he supposed to have known that the Coronal was touchy about having to become Pontifex some day? It was only to be expected, wasn’t it? When a Pontifex died, the Coronal automatically took his place, and named a new Coronal who would himself eventually go on to dwell in the Labyrinth. That was the system: that was the way it had been for thousands of years. If Lord Valentine disliked the idea of being Pontifex so much, he might better have served himself by declining to become Coronal; but it didn’t make sense for him to close his eyes to the succession law in the hope it would go away.

Though the Coronal himself had maintained a cool silence, great damage surely had been done. To show up late, then to say the wrongest possible thing the first time he opened his mouth—what a woeful beginning! Could it ever be undone? Hissune brooded about it all through the performance of some terrible jugglers, and during the dreary speeches that followed, and he might have gone on agonizing over it all evening, if something far worse had not happened.

It was Lord Valentine’s turn to make a speech. But the Coronal seemed strangely remote and preoccupied as he got to his feet. He appeared almost to be sleepwalking—his eyes distant and vague, his gestures uncertain. At the high table people began to murmur. After an awful moment of silence he started to speak, but apparently it was the wrong speech, and very muddled besides. Was the Coronal sick? Drunk? Under some sudden malign spell? It troubled Hissune to see Lord Valentine so bewildered. Old Hornkast had just finished saying that the Coronal not only governed Majipoor but in some sense was Majipoor: and there was the Coronal a moment later, tottering, incoherent, looking as though he was about to topple—

Someone should take him by the arm, Hissune thought, and help him to sit down before he falls. But no one moved. No one dared. Please, Hissune begged silently, staring at Sleet, at Tunigorn, at Ermanar. Stop him, someone. Stop him. And still no one moved.

“Lordship!” a voice cried hoarsely.

Hissune realized it was his own. And he went rushing forward to seize the Coronal as he dropped headlong toward the gleaming wooden floor.

6

This is the dream of the Pontifex Tyeveras:

Here in the realm that I inhabit now, nothing has color and nothing has sound and nothing has motion. The alabandina blossoms are black and the shining fronds of the semotan trees are white, and from the bird that does not fly comes a song that cannot be heard. I lie on a bed of soft gentle rubbermoss, staring upward at drops of rain that do not fall. When the wind blows in the glade, not a leaf flutters. The name of this realm is death, and the alabandinas and semotans are dead, and the bird is dead, and the wind and the rain are dead. And I too am dead.

They come and stand about me and they say, “Are you Tyeveras that was Coronal of Majipoor and Pontifex of Majipoor?”

And I say, “I am dead.”

“Are you Tyeveras?” they say again.

And I say, “I am dead Tyeveras, that was your king and that was your emperor. See, I have no color? See, I make no sound? I am dead.”

“You are not dead.”

“Here on my right hand is Lord Malibor that was my first Coronal. He is dead, is he not? Here on my left hand is Lord Voriax that was my second Coronal. Is he not dead? I lie between two dead men. I also am dead.”

“Come and rise and walk, Tyeveras that was Coronal, Tyeveras that is Pontifex.”

“I need not do that. I am excused, for I am dead.”

“Listen to our voices.”

“Your voices make no sound.”

“Listen, Tyeveras, listen, listen, listen!”

“The alabandinas are black. The sky is white. This is the realm of death.”

“Come and rise and walk, Emperor of Majipoor.”

“Who are you?”

“Valentine that is your third Coronal.”

“I hail you, Valentine, Pontifex of Majipoor!”

“That title is not yet mine. Come and rise and walk.”

And I say, “It is not required of me, for I am dead,” but they say, “We do not hear you, king that was, emperor that is,” and then the voice that says it is the voice of Valentine tells me once more, “Come and rise and walk,” and the hand of Valentine is on my hand in this realm where nothing moves, and it pulls me upward, and I drift, light as air floating on air, and I go forth, moving without motion, breathing without drawing breath. Together we cross a bridge that curves like the rainbow’s arc across an abyss as deep as the world is broad, and its shimmering metal skin rings with a sound like the singing of young girls with each step I take. On the far side all is flooded with color: amber, turquoise, coral, lilac, emerald, auburn, indigo, crimson. The vault of the sky is jade and the sharp strands of sunlight that pierce the air are bronze. Everything flows, everything billows: there is no firmness, there is no stability. The voices say, “This is life, Tyeveras! This is your proper realm!” To which I make no reply, for after all I am dead and merely dreaming that I live: but I begin to weep, and my tears are all the colors of the stars.

And this too is the dream of the Pontifex Tyeveras:

I sit enthroned on a machine within a machine, and about me is a wall of blue glass. I hear bubbling sounds, and the soft ticking of intricate mechanisms. My heart beats slowly: I am aware of each heavy surge of fluid through its chambers, but that fluid, I think, is probably not blood. Whatever it is, though, it moves in me, and I am aware of it. Therefore I must surely be alive. How can that be? I am so old: have I then outlived death itself? I am Tyeveras that was Coronal to Ossier, and I touched once the hand of Lord Kinniken when the Castle was his, and Ossier only a prince, and the second Pontifex Thimin had the Labyrinth. If that is so, I think I must be the only man of Thimin’s time who is yet alive, if I am alive, and I think I am alive. But I sleep. I dream. A great stillness enfolds me. Color seeps from the world. All is black, all is white, nothing moves, there is no sound. This is how I imagine the realm of death to be. Look, there is the Pontifex Confalume, and there is Prestimion, and there is Dekkeret! All those great emperors lie staring upward toward rain that does not fall, and in words without sound they say, Welcome, Tyeveras that was, welcome, weary old king, come lie beside us, now that you are dead like us. Yes. Yes. Ah, how beautiful it is here! Look, there is Lord Malibor, that man of the city of Bombifale in whom I hoped so much, so wrongly, and he is dead, and that is Lord Voriax of the black beard and the ruddy cheeks, but his cheeks are not ruddy now. And at last am I permitted to join them. Everything is silent. Everything is still. At last, at last, at last! At last they let me die, even if it is only when I dream.

And so the Pontifex Tyeveras floats midway between worlds, neither dead nor alive, dreaming of the world of the living when he thinks that he is dead, dreaming of the realm of death when he remembers that he is alive.

7

“A little wine, if you will,” Valentine said. Sleet put the bowl in his hand, and the Coronal drank deeply. “I was just dozing,” he muttered. “A quick nap, before the banquet— and that dream, Sleet! That dream! Get me Tisana, will you? I have to have a speaking of that dream.”

“With respect, lordship, there’s no time for that now,” said Sleet.

“We’ve come to fetch you,” Tunigorn put in. “The banquet’s about to begin. Protocol requires that you be at the dais when the Pontifical officials—”

“Protocol! Protocol! That dream was almost like a sending, don’t you understand! Such a vision of disaster—”

“The Coronal does not receive sendings, lordship,” Sleet said quietly. “And the banquet will start in minutes, and we must robe you and convey you. You’ll have Tisana and her potions afterward, if you like, my lord. But for now—”

“I must explore that dream!”

“I understand. But there lacks the time. Come, my lord.”

He knew that Sleet and Tunigorn were right: like it or not, he must get himself to the banquet at once. It was more than just a social event; it was a rite of courtesy, the showing of honor by the senior monarch to the younger king who was his adopted son and anointed successor, and even though the Pontifex might be senile or altogether mad the Coronal did not have the option of taking the event lightly. He must go, and the dream must wait. No dream so potent, so rife with omen, could simply be ignored—he would need a dream-speaking, and probably a conference with the wizard Deliamber also—but there would be time to deal with all that afterward.

“Come, lordship,” Sleet said again, holding his ermine robe of office out to him.

The heavy spell of that vision still clung to Valentine’s spirit when he entered the Great Hall of the Pontifex ten minutes later. But it would not do for the Coronal of Majipoor to seem dour or preoccupied at such an event, and so he put upon his face the most affable expression he could manage, as he made his way toward the high table.

Which was, indeed, the way he had conducted himself all throughout the interminable week of this official visit: the forced smile, the studied amiability. Of all the cities of giant Majipoor, the Labyrinth was the one Lord Valentine loved least. It was to him a grim, oppressive place that he entered only when the unavoidable responsibilities of office required it. Just as he felt most keenly alive under the warm summer sun and the great vault of the open sky, riding in some forest in heavy leaf, a fair fresh wind tossing his golden hair about, so did he feel buried before his time whenever he entered this cheerless sunken city. He loathed its dismal descending coils, its infinity of shadowy underground levels, its claustrophobic atmosphere.

And most of all he loathed the knowledge of the inevitable destiny that awaited him here, when he must succeed to the title of Pontifex at last, and give up the sweet joys of life on Castle Mount, and take up residence for the rest of his days in this dreadful living tomb.

Tonight in particular, this banquet in the Great Hall, on the deepest level of the gloomy subterranean city—how he had dreaded that! The hideous hall itself, all harsh angles and glaring lights and weird ricocheting reflections, and the pompous officials of the Pontifical staff in their preposterous little traditional masks, and the windy speechmaking, and the boredom, and above all the burdensome sense of the entire Labyrinth pressing down upon him like a colossal mass of stone—merely to think of it had filled him with horror. Perhaps that ugly dream, he thought, had been a mere foreshadowing of the uneasiness he felt about what he must endure tonight.

Yet to his surprise he found himself unwinding, relaxing—not precisely enjoying himself at the banquet, no, hardly that, but at least finding it within his endurance.

They had redecorated the hall. That helped. Brilliant banners in green and gold, the colors emblematic of the Coronal, had been hung everywhere, blurring and disguising the strangely disquieting outlines of the enormous room. The lighting too had been changed since his last visit: gentle glowfloats now drifted pleasantly through the air.

And plainly the officials of the Pontifex had spared neither cost nor effort in making the occasion a festive one. From the legendary Pontifical wine cellars came an astounding procession of the planet’s finest vintages: the golden fireshower wine of Pidruid, and the dry white of Amblemorn, and then the delicate red of Ni-moya, followed by a rich, robust purple wine of Muldemar that had been laid down years ago, in the reign of Lord Malibor. With each wine, of course, an appropriate delicacy: chilled thokkaberries, smoked sea dragon, calimbots in Narabal style, roast haunch of bilantoon. And an unending flow of entertainment: singers, mimes, harpists, jugglers. From time to time one of the Pontifex’s minions would glance warily toward the high table where Lord Valentine and his companions sat, as though to ask, Is it sufficient? Is your lordship content?

And Valentine met each of those worried glances with a warm smile, a friendly nod, a lifting of his wine-bowl, by way of telling his uneasy hosts, Yes, yes, I am well pleased with all you have done for us.

“What edgy little jackals they all are!” Sleet cried. “You can smell the worry-sweat on them from six tables away.”

Which led to a foolish and painful remark from young Hissune about the likelihood that they were trying to curry favor with Lord Valentine against the day when he became Pontifex. The unexpected tactlessness stung Valentine with whiplash effect, and he turned away, heart racing, throat suddenly dry. He forced himself to remain calm: smiled across the tables to the high spokesman Hornkast, nodded to the Pontifical majordomo, beamed at this one and that, while behind him he could hear Shanamir explaining irately to Hissune the nature of his blunder.

In a moment Valentine’s anger had ebbed. Why should the boy have known, after all, that that was a forbidden topic of discussion? But there was nothing he could do to put an end to Hissune’s obvious humiliation without acknowledging the depth of his sensitivity on that score; so he let himself glide back into conversation as though nothing untoward had happened.

Then five jugglers appeared, three humans, a Skandar, and a Hjort, to cause a blessed distraction. They commenced a wild and frenzied hurling of torches, sickles, and knives that brought cheers and applause from the Coronal.

Of course, they were mere flashy third-raters whose flaws and insufficiencies and evasions were evident enough to Valentine’s expert eye. No matter: jugglers always gave him delight. Inevitably they recalled to his mind that strange and blissful time years before, when he had been a juggler himself, wandering from town to town with an itinerant raggle-taggle troupe. He had been innocent then, untroubled by the burdens of power, a truly happy man.

Valentine’s enthusiasm for the jugglers drew a scowl from Sleet, who said sourly, “Ah, lordship, do you truly think they’re as good as all that?”

“They show great zeal, Sleet.”

“So do cattle that forage for fodder in a dry season. But they are cattle nonetheless. And these zealous jugglers of yours are little more than amateurs, my lord.”

“Oh, Sleet, Sleet, show more mercy!”

“There are certain standards in this craft, my lord. As you should still remember.”

Valentine chuckled. “The joy these people give me has little to do with their skills, Sleet. Seeing them stirs recollections in me of other days, a simpler life, bygone companions.”

“Ah, then,” Sleet said. “That’s another matter, my lord! That is sentiment. But I speak of craft.”

“We speak of different things, then.”

The jugglers took their leave in a flurry of furious throws and bungled catches, and Valentine sat back, smiling, cheerful. But the fun’s over, he thought. Time for the speeches now.

Even those proved surprisingly tolerable, though. Shinaam delivered the first: the Pontifical minister of internal affairs, a man of the Ghayrog race, with glistening reptilian scales and a flickering forked red tongue. Gracefully and swiftly he offered formal welcome to Lord Valentine and his entourage.

The adjutant Ermanar made reply on behalf of the Coronal. When he was done, it was the turn of ancient shriveled Dilifon, private secretary to the Pontifex, who conveyed the personal greetings of the high monarch. Which was mere fraud, Valentine knew, since it was common knowledge that old Tyeveras had not spoken a rational word to anyone close upon a decade. But he accepted Dilifon’s quavering fabrications politely and delegated Tunigorn to offer the response.

Then Hornkast spoke: the high spokesman of the Pontificate, plump, solemn, the true ruler of the Labyrinth in these years of the senility of the Pontifex Tyeveras. His theme, he declared, was the grand processional. Valentine sat to attention at once: for in the past year he had thought of little else than the processional, that far-ranging ceremonial journey in which the Coronal must go forth upon Majipoor and show himself to the people, and receive from them their homage, their allegiance, their love.

“It may seem to some,” said Hornkast, “a mere pleasure jaunt, a trivial and meaningless holiday from the cares of office. Not so! Not so! For it is the person of the Coronal—the actual, physical person, not a banner, not a flag, not a portrait—that binds all the far-flung provinces of the world to a common loyalty. And it is only through periodic contact with the actual presence of that royal person that that loyalty is renewed.”

Valentine frowned and looked away. Through his mind there surged a sudden disturbing image: the landscape of Majipoor sundered and upheaved, and one solitary man desperately wrestling with the splintered terrain, striving to thrust everything back into place.

“For the Coronal,” Hornkast went on, “is the embodiment of Majipoor. The Coronal is Majipoor personified. He is the world; the world is the Coronal. And so when he undertakes the grand processional, as you, Lord Valentine, now will do for the first time since your glorious restoration, he is not only going forth to the world, but he is going forth to himself—to a voyage into his own soul, to an encounter with the deepest roots of his identity—”

Was it so? Of course. Of course. Hornkast, he knew, was simply spouting standard rhetoric, oratorical noises of a sort that Valentine had had to endure all too often. And yet, this time the words seemed to trigger something in him, seemed to open some great dark tunnel of mysteries. That dream—the cold wind blowing across Castle Mount, the groans of the earth, the shattered landscape—The Coronal is the embodiment of Majipoor —he is the world —

Once in his reign already that unity had been broken, when Valentine, thrust from power by treachery, stripped of his memory and even of his own body, had been hurled into exile. Was it to happen again? A second overthrow, a second downfall? Or was something even more dreadful imminent, something far more serious than the fate of one single man?

He tasted the unfamiliar taste of fear. Banquet or no, Valentine knew he should have gone at once for a dream-speaking. Some grim knowledge was striving to break through to his awareness, beyond all doubt. Something was wrong within the Coronal—which was the same as saying something was wrong in the world—

“My lord?” It was Autifon Deliamber. The little Vroonish wizard said, “It is time, my lord, for you to offer the final toast.”

“What? When?”

“Now, my lord.”

“Ah. Indeed,” Valentine said vaguely. “The final toast, yes.”

He rose and let his gaze journey throughout the great room, into its most shadowy depths. And a sudden strangeness came upon him, for he realized that he was entirely unprepared. He had little notion of what he was to say, or to whom he should direct it, or even—really—what he was doing in this place at all. The Labyrinth? Was this in truth the Labyrinth, that loathsome place of shadows and mildew? Why was he here? What did these people want him to do? Perhaps this was merely another dream, and he had never left Castle Mount. He did not know. He did not understand anything.

Something will come, he thought. I need only wait. But he waited, and nothing came, except deeper strangeness. He felt a throbbing in his forehead, a humming in his ears. Then he experienced a powerful sense of himself here in the Labyrinth as occupying a place at the precise center of the world, the core of the whole gigantic globe. But some irresistible force was pulling him from that place. Between one moment and the next his soul went surging from him as though it were a great mantle of light, streaming upward through the many layers of the Labyrinth to the surface and then reaching forth to encompass all the immensity of Majipoor, even to the distant coasts of Zimroel and sun-blackened Suvrael, and the unknown expanse of the Great Sea on the far side of the planet. He wrapped the world like a glowing veil. In that dizzying moment he felt that he and the planet were one, that he embodied in himself the twenty billion people of Majipoor, humans and Skandars and Hjorts and Metamorphs and all the rest, moving within him like the corpuscles of his blood. He was everywhere at once: he was all the sorrow in the world, and all the joy, and all the yearning, and all the need. He was everything. He was a boiling universe of contradictions and conflicts. He felt the heat of the desert and the warm rain of the tropics and the chill of the high peaks. He laughed and wept and died and made love and ate and drank and danced and fought and rode wildly through unknown hills and toiled in the fields and cut a path through thick vine-webbed jungles. In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. Faces without eyes hovered before him, grinning, leering. Bony attenuated hands fluttered in the air. Choirs sang discordant hymns. All at once, at once, at once, a terrible lunatic simultaneity.

He stood in silence, bewildered, lost, as the room reeled wildly about him. “Propose the toast, lordship,” Deliamber seemed to be saying over and over. “First to the Pontifex, and then to his aides, and then—”

Control yourself, Valentine thought. You are Coronal of Majipoor.

With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination.

“The toast to the Pontifex, lordship—”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

Phantom images still haunted him. Ghostly fleshless fingers plucked at him. He fought free. Control. Control. Control.

He felt utterly lost.

“The toast, lordship!”

The toast? The toast? What was that? A ceremony. An obligation upon him.You are Coronal of Majipoor. Yes. He must speak. He must say words to these people.

“Friends—” he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos.

8

“The Coronal wants to see you,” Shanamir said.

Hissune looked up, startled. For the past hour and a half he had been waiting tensely in a dismal many-columned antechamber with a grotesque bulbous ceiling, wondering what was happening behind the closed doors of Lord Valentine’s suite and whether he was supposed to remain here indefinitely. It was well past midnight, and some ten hours from now the Coronal and his staff were to depart from the Labyrinth on the next leg of the grand processional, unless tonight’s strange events had altered that plan. Hissune still had to make his way all the way up to the outermost ring, gather his possessions and say goodbye to his mother and sisters, and get back here in time to join the outbound party—and fit some sleep into the picture, too. All was in confusion.

After the collapse of the Coronal, after Lord Valentine had been carried away to his suite, after the banquet hall had been cleared, Hissune and some of the other members of the Coronal’s group had assembled in this drab room nearby. Word had come, after a time, that Lord Valentine was recovering well, and that they were all to wait there for further instructions. Then, one by one, they had been summoned to the Coronal—Tunigorn first, then Ermanar, Asenhart, Shanamir, and the rest, until Hissune was left alone with some members of the Coronal’s guard and a few very minor staff people. He did not feel like asking any of these subalterns what the appropriate thing for him to do might be; but he dared not leave, either, and so he waited, and waited some more, and went on waiting.

He closed his eyes when they grew raw and began to ache, though he did not sleep. A single image revolved endlessly in his mind: the Coronal beginning to fall, and he and Lisamon Hultin springing from their seats at the same moment to catch him. He was unable to shake from his mind the horror of that sudden astonishing climax to the banquet: the Coronal bemused, pathetic, groping for words and failing to find the right ones, swaying, teetering, falling—

Of course a Coronal was just as capable of getting himself drunk and behaving foolishly as anyone else. One of the many things that Hissune’s illicit explorations of the memory-readings in the Register of Souls during the years he worked in the House of Records had taught him was that there was nothing superhuman about the men who wore the starburst crown. So it was altogether possible that this evening Lord Valentine, who seemed so intensely to dislike being in the Labyrinth, had allowed the free-flowing wine to ease that dislike, until, when it was his turn to speak, he was in a drunken muddle.

But somehow Hissune doubted that it was wine that had muddled the Coronal, even though Lord Valentine had said as much himself. He had been watching the Coronal closely all during the speechmaking, and he hadn’t seemed at all drunk then, only convivial, joyous, relaxed. And afterward, when the little Vroonish wizard had brought Lord Valentine back from his swoon by touching his tentacles to him, the Coronal had seemed a trifle shaky, as anyone who had fainted might be, but nevertheless quite clearheaded. Nobody could sober up that fast. No, Hissune thought, more likely it had been something other than drunkenness, some sorcery, some deep sending that had seized Lord Valentine’s spirit just at that moment. And that was terrifying.

He rose now and went down the winding corridor to the Coronal’s chambers. As he approached the intricately carved door, gleaming with brilliant golden starbursts and royal monograms, it opened and Tunigorn and Ermanar emerged, looking drawn and somber. They nodded to him and Tunigorn, with a quick gesture of his finger, ordered the guards at the door to let him go in.

Lord Valentine sat at a broad desk of some rare and highly polished blood-colored wood. The Coronal’s big heavy-knuckled hands were spread out before him against the surface of the desk, as though he were supporting himself with them. His face was pale, his eyes seemed to be having difficulty focusing, his shoulders were slumped.

“My lord—” Hissune began uncertainly, and faltered into silence.

He remained just within the doorway, feeling awkward, out of place, keenly uncomfortable. Lord Valentine did not seem to have noticed him. The old dream-speaker Tisana was in the room, and Sleet, and the Vroon, but no one said a thing. Hissune was baffled. He had no idea what the etiquette of approaching a tired and obviously ill Coronal might be. Was one supposed to offer one’s kind sympathies, or to pretend that the monarch was in the finest of health? Hissune made the starburst gesture, and, getting no response, made it again. He felt his cheeks blazing.

He searched for some shred of his former youthful self-assurance, and found nothing. Strangely, he seemed to be growing more ill at ease with Lord Valentine, rather than less, the more often he saw the Coronal. That was hard to understand.

Sleet rescued him at last, saying loudly, “My lord, it is the Initiate Hissune.”

The Coronal raised his head and stared at Hissune. The depth of fatigue that his fixed and glassy eyes revealed was terrifying. And yet, as Hissune watched in amazement, Lord Valentine drew himself back from the brink of exhaustion the way a man who has caught a vine after slipping over the edge of a precipice pulls himself to safety: with a desperate show of unanswerable strength. It was astonishing to see some color come to his cheeks, some animation to his expression. He managed even to project a distinct kingliness, a feeling of command. Hissune, awed, wondered if it might be some trick they learn on Castle Mount, when they are in training to become Coronals—

“Come closer,” Lord Valentine said.

Hissune took a couple of steps deeper into the room.

“Are you afraid of me?”

“My lord—”

“I can’t allow you to waste time fearing me, Hissune. I have too much work to do. And so do you. Once I believed that you felt absolutely no awe of me at all. Was I wrong?”

“My lord, it’s only that you look so tired—and I’m tired myself, I suppose—this night has been so strange, for me, for you, for everyone—”

The Coronal nodded. “A night full of great strangenesses, yes. Is it morning yet? I never know the time, when I’m in this place.”

“A little past midnight, my lord.”

“Only a little past midnight? I thought it was almost morning. How long this night has been!” Lord Valentine laughed softly. “But it’s always a little past midnight in the Labyrinth, isn’t it, Hissune? By the Divine, if you could know how I yearn to see the sun again!”

“My lord—” Deliamber murmured tactfully. “It does indeed grow late, and there is still much to do—”

“Indeed.” For an instant the Coronal’s eyes flickered into glassiness again. Then, recovering once more, he said, “To business, then. The first item of which is the giving of my thanks. I’d have been badly hurt but for your being there to catch me. You must have been on your way toward me before I went over, eh? Was it that obvious I was about to keel over?”

Reddening a little, Hissune said, “It was, lordship. At least to me.”

“Ah.”

“But I may have been watching you more closely than the others were.”

“Yes. I dare say you may have been.”

“I hope your lordship won’t greatly suffer the ill effects of—of—”

A faint smile appeared on the Coronal’s lips. “I wasn’t drunk, Hissune.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—I mean—but that is to say—”

“Not drunk, no. A spell, a sending—who knows? Wine is one thing, and sorcery’s another, and I think I still can tell the difference. It was a dark vision, boy: not the first I’ve had lately. The omens are troublesome. War’s on the wind.”

“War?” Hissune blurted. The word was unfamiliar, alien, ugly: it hovered in the air like some foul droning insect looking for prey. War? War? Into Hissune’s mind leaped an image eight thousand years old, springing from the cache of memories he had stolen in the Register of Souls: the dry hills of the far northwest ablaze, the sky black with thick coils of rising smoke, in the final awful convulsion of Lord Stiamot’s long war against the Metamorphs. But that was ancient history. There had been no war in all the centuries since, other than the war of restoration. And scarce any lives had been lost in that, by design of Lord Valentine, to whom violence was an abomination. “How can there be war?” Hissune demanded. “We have no wars on Majipoor!”

“War’s coming, boy!” said Sleet roughly. “And when it does, by the Lady, there’ll be no hiding from it!”

“But war with whom? This is the most peaceful of worlds. What enemy could there be?”

“There is one,” Sleet said. “Are you Labyrinth people so sheltered from the real world that you fail to comprehend that?”

Hissune frowned. “The Metamorphs, you mean?”

“Aye, the Metamorphs!” Sleet cried. “The filthy Shapeshifters, boy! Did you think we could keep them penned up forever? By the Lady, there’ll be a rampage soon enough!”

Hissune stared in shock and amazement at the lean little scar-faced man. Sleet’s eyes were shining. He seemed almost to welcome the prospect.

Shaking his head slowly, Hissune said, “With all respect, High Counsellor Sleet, this makes no sense to me. A few millions of them, against twenty billions of us? They fought that war once, and lost it, and however much they hate us, I don’t think they’re going to try it again.”

Sleet pointed toward the Coronal, who seemed barely to be listening. “And the time they put their own puppet on Lord Valentine’s throne? What was that if not a declaration of war? Ah, boy, boy, you know nothing! The Shapeshifters have been scheming against us for centuries, and their time is at hand. The Coronal’s own dreams foretell it! By the Lady, the Coronal himself dreams of war!”

“By the Lady indeed, Sleet,” said the Coronal in a voice of infinite weariness, “there’ll be no war if I can help it, and you know that.”

“And if you can’t help it, my lord?” Sleet shot back.

The little man’s chalk-white face was flushed now with excitement; his eyes gleamed, he made tight rapid obsessive gestures with his hands, as though he were juggling invisible clubs. It had not occurred to Hissune that anyone, even a High Counsellor, spoke so bluntly to Coronals. And perhaps it did not happen often, for Hissune saw something much like anger cross the face of Lord Valentine: Lord Valentine who was reputed never to have known rage, who had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration. Then that anger gave way to the dreadful weariness again, which made the Coronal seem to be a man of seventy or eighty years, and not the young and vigorous forty or so that Hissune knew him to be.

There was an endless moment of tense silence. At length Lord Valentine said, speaking slowly and deliberately and addressing his words to Hissune as though no one else were in the room. “Let me hear no more talk of war while hope of peace remains. But the omens were dark, true enough: if there is not to be war, there is certain to be some calamity of another kind. I will not ignore such warnings. We have changed some of our plans this night, Hissune.”

“Will you call off the grand processional, my lord?”

“That I must not do. Again and again I’ve postponed it, saying that there was too much work for me at Castle Mount, that I had no time to go jaunting about the world. Perhaps I’ve postponed it too long. The processional should be made every seven or eight years.”

“And has it been longer than that, sir?”

“Almost ten. Nor did I complete the tour, that other time, for at Til-omon, you know, there was that small interruption, when someone else relieved me for a while of my tasks, without my knowledge.” The Coronal stared past Hissune into an infinitely remote distance. He seemed for a moment to be peering into the misty gulfs of time: thinking, perhaps, of the bizarre usurpation that had been worked upon him by the Barjazid, and of the months or years that he had roamed Majipoor bereft of his mind and of his might. Lord Valentine shook his head. “No, the grand processional must be made. Must be extended, in fact. I had thought to travel only through Alhanroel, but I think we will need to visit both continents. The people of Zimroel also must see that there is a Coronal. And if Sleet is right that the Metamorphs are the ones we must fear, why, then Zimroel is the place we must go, for that is where the Metamorphs dwell.”

Hissune had not expected that. A great surge of excitement arose in him. Zimroel too! That unimaginably distant place of forests and vast rivers and great cities, more than half legendary to him—magical cities with magical names—

“Ah, if that is the new plan, how splendid it sounds, my lord!” he said, smiling broadly. “I had thought never to see that land, except in dreams! Will we go to Ni-moya? And Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal—”

“Quite likely I will,” said the Coronal in an oddly flat voice that fell upon Hissune’s ears like a cudgel.

“I, my lord?” said Hissune with sudden alarm.

Softly Lord Valentine said, “Another of the changes of plan. You will not be accompanying me on the grand processional.”

A terrible chill swept through Hissune then, as if the wind that blows between the stars had descended and was scouring out the deepest chambers of the Labyrinth. He trembled, and his soul shriveled under that cold blast, and he felt himself withering away to a husk.

“Am I then dismissed from your service, lordship?”

“Dismissed? Not at all! Surely you understand that I have important plans for you!”

“So you have said, several times, my lord. But the processional—”

“Is not the right preparation for the tasks you someday will be called upon to perform. No, Hissune, I can’t afford to let you spend the next year or two bounding around from province to province at my side. You’re to leave for Castle Mount as soon as possible.”

“Castle Mount, my lord?”

“To begin the training appropriate to a knight-initiate.”

“My lord?” said Hissune in amazement.

“You are—what, eighteen? So you’re years behind the others. But you’re quick: you’ll make up for the lost time, you’ll rise to your true level soon enough. You must, Hissune. We have no idea what evil is about to come upon our world, but I know now that I must expect the worst, and prepare for it by preparing others to stand beside me when the worst arrives. So there will be no grand processional for you, Hissune.”

“I understand, my lord.”

“Do you? Yes, I think you do. There’ll be time later for you to see Piliplok and Ni-moya and Pidruid, won’t there? But now—now—”

Hissune nodded, though in truth he hardly dared to think that he comprehended what Lord Valentine appeared to be telling him. For a long moment the Coronal stared at him; and Hissune met the gaze of those weary blue eyes steadily and evenly, though he was beginning to feel an exhaustion beyond anything he had ever known. The audience, he realized, had come to its end, though no word of dismissal had been uttered. In silence he made the starburst gesture and backed from the room.

He wanted nothing more than sleep now, a week of it, a month. This bewildering night had drained him of all his strength. Only two days ago this same Lord Valentine had summoned him to this very room, and told him to make ready at once to leave the Labyrinth, for he was to set forth as part of the royal entourage that was making the grand processional through Alhanroel; and yesterday he had been named one of the Coronal’s aides, and given a seat at the high table of tonight’s banquet; and now the banquet had come and gone in mysterious chaos, and he had beheld the Coronal haggard and all too human in his confusion, and the gift of the grand processional had been snatched back, and now—Castle Mount? A knight-initiate? Making up for lost time? Making up what? Life has become a dream, Hissune thought. And there is no one who can speak it for me.

In the hallway outside the Coronal’s suite, Sleet caught him suddenly by the wrist and pulled him close. Hissune sensed the strange power of the man, the taut energies coiled within him.

“Just to tell you, boy—I meant no personal enmity, when I spoke so harshly to you in there.”

“I never took it that way.”

“Good. Good. I want no enmity with you.”

“Nor I with you, Sleet.”

“I think we’ll have much work to do together, you and I, when the war comes.”

“If the war comes.”

Sleet smiled bleakly. “There’s no doubt of it. But I won’t fight that battle with you all over again just now. You’ll come over to my way of thinking soon enough. Valentine can’t see trouble until trouble’s biting at his boots—it’s his nature, he’s too sweet, has too much faith in the good will of others, I think—but you’re different, eh, boy? You walk with your eyes open. I think that’s what the Coronal prizes the most in you. Do you follow what I say?”

“It’s been a long night, Sleet.”

“So it has. Get some sleep, boy. If you can.”

9

The first rays of morning sun touched the ragged gray muddy shore of southeastern Zimroel and lit that somber coast with a pale green glow. The coming of dawn brought instant wake-fulness to the five Liimen camped in a torn, many-times-patched tent on the flank of a dune a few hundred yards from the sea. Without a word they rose, scooped handfuls of damp sand, rubbed it over the rough, pockmarked gray-black skin of their chests and arms to make the morning ablution. When they left the tent, they turned toward the west, where a few faint stars still glowed in the dark sky, and offered their salute.

One of those stars, perhaps, was the one from which their ancestors had come. They had no idea which star that might be. No one did. Seven thousand years had passed since the first Liiman migrants had come to Majipoor, and in that time much knowledge had been lost. During their wanderings over this giant planet, going wherever there might be simple menial jobs to perform, the Liimen had long since forgotten the place that was their starting point. But someday they would know it again.

The eldest male lit the fire. The youngest brought forth the skewers and arranged the meat on them. The two women silently took the skewers and held them in the flames until they could hear the song of the dripping fat. In silence then they handed the chunks of meat around, and in silence the Liimen ate what would be their only meal of the day.

Silent still, they filed from the tent, eldest male, then the women, then the other two males: five slender, wide-shouldered beings with flat broad heads and fierce bright eyes arrayed in a triple set across their expressionless faces. Down to the edge of the sea they walked, and took up positions on a narrow snub of a headland, just out of reach of the surf, as they had done every morning for weeks.

There they waited, in silence, each hoping that this day would bring the coming of the dragons.

The southeastern coast of Zimroel—the huge province known as Gihorna—is one of Majipoor’s most obscure regions: a land without cities, a forgotten place of thin gray sandy soil and moist blustery breezes, subject at unpredictable intervals to colossal, vastly destructive sandstorms. There is no natural harbor for hundreds of miles along that unhappy coast, only an endless ridge of low shabby hills sloping down to a sodden strand against which the surf of the Inner Sea crashes with a sad dull sound. In the early years of the settlement of Majipoor, explorers who ventured into that forlorn quarter of the western continent reported that there was nothing there worth a second look, and on a planet otherwise so full of miracles and wonders that was the most damning dismissal imaginable.

So Gihorna was bypassed as the development of the new continent got under way. Settlement after settlement was established—Piliplok first, midway up the eastern coast at the mouth of the broad River Zimr, and then Pidruid in the distant northwest, and Ni-moya on the great bend of the Zimr far inland, and Til-omon, and Narabal, and Velathys, and the shining Ghayrog city of Dulorn, and many more. Outposts turned into towns, and towns into cities, and cities into great cities that sent forth tendrils of expansion creeping outward across the astonishing immensities of Zimroel; but still there was no reason to go into Gihorna, and no one did. Not even the Shapeshifters, when Lord Stiamot had finally subjugated them and dumped them down in a forest reservation just across the River Steiche from the western reaches of Gihorna, had cared to cross the river into the dismal lands beyond.

Much later—thousands of years later, when most of Zimroel had begun to seem as tame as Alhanroel—a few settlers at last did filter into Gihorna. Nearly all were Liimen, simple and undemanding people who had never woven themselves deeply into the fabric of Majipoori life. By choice, it seemed they held themselves apart, earning a few weights here and there as sellers of grilled sausages, as fishermen, as itinerant laborers. It was easy for these drifting folk, whose lives seemed bleak and colorless to the other races of Majipoor, to drift on into bleak and colorless Gihorna. There they settled in tiny villages, and strung nets just beyond the surf to catch the swarming silvery-gray fishes, and dug pits in which to trap the big glossy octagonal-shelled black crabs that scuttled along the beaches in packs numbering many hundreds, and for a feast went out to hunt the sluggish tender-fleshed dhumkars that lived half-buried in the dunes.

Most of the year the Liimen had Gihorna to themselves. But not in summer, for summer was dragon time.

In early summer, the tents of curiosity-seekers began to sprout like yellow calimbots after a warm rain, all along the coast of Zimroel from a point just south of Piliplok to the edge of the impassable Zimr Marsh. This was the season when the sea-dragon herds made their annual journey up the eastern side of the continent, heading out into the waters between Piliplok and the Isle of Sleep, where they would bear their young.

The coast below Piliplok was the only place on Majipoor where it was possible to get a good view of the dragons without going to sea, for here the pregnant cows liked to come close to shore, and feed on the small creatures that lived in the dense thatches of golden seaweed so widespread in those waters. So each year at dragon-passage time the dragon watchers arrived by the thousands, from all over the world, and set up their tents. Some were magnificent airy structures, virtual palaces of soaring slender poles and shimmering fabric, that were occupied by touring members of the nobility. Some were the sturdy and efficient tents of prosperous merchants and their families. And some were the simple lean-tos of ordinary folk who had saved for years to make this journey.

The aristocrats came to Gihorna in dragon time because they found it entertaining to watch the enormous sea dragons gliding through the water, and because it was agreeably unusual to spend a holiday in such a hideously ugly place. The rich merchants came because the undertaking of such a costly trip would surely enhance their position in their communities, and because their children would learn something useful about the natural history of Majipoor that might do them some good in school. The ordinary people came because they believed that it brought a lifetime of good luck to observe the passage of the dragons, though nobody was quite sure why that should be the case.

And then there were the Liimen, to whom the time of the dragons was a matter neither of amusement nor of prestige nor of the hope of fortune’s kindness, but of the most profound significance: a matter of redemption, a matter of salvation.

No one could predict exactly when the dragons would turn up along the Gihorna coast. Though they always came in summer, sometimes they came early and sometimes they came late; and this year they were late. The five Liimen, taking up their positions on the little headland each morning, saw nothing day after day but gray sea, white foam, dark masses of seaweed. But they were not impatient people. Sooner or later the dragons would arrive.

The day when they finally came into view was warm and close, with a hot humid wind blowing out of the west. All that morning crabs in platoons and phalanxes and regiments marched restlessly up and down the beach, as though they were drilling to repel invaders. That was always a sign.

Toward noon came a second sign: up from the heaving surf tumbled a great fat pudding of a rip-toad, all belly and mouth and saw-edged teeth. It staggered a few yards ashore and hunkered down in the sand, panting, shivering, blinking its vast milky-hued eyes. A second toad emerged a moment later not far away and sat staring malevolently at the first. Then came a little procession of big-leg lobsters, a dozen or more gaudy blue and purple creatures with swollen orange haunches, that marched from the water with great determination and quickly began to dig themselves into the mud. They were followed by red-eyed scallops dancing on wiry little yellow legs, and little angular white-faced hatchet-eels, and even some fish, that lay helplessly flopping about as the crabs of the shore fell upon them.

The Liimen nodded to each other in rising excitement. Only one thing could cause the creatures of the offshore shallows to stray up onto the land this way. The musky smell of the sea dragons, preceding the dragons themselves by a little while, must have begun to pervade the water.

“Look now,” the eldest male said shortly.

Out of the south came the vanguard of the dragons, two or three dozen immense beasts holding their black leathery wings spread high and wide and their long massive necks curving upward and out like great bows. Serenely they moved into the groves of seaweed and began to harvest them: slapping their wings against the surface of the water, stirring turmoil among the creatures of the seaweed, striking with sudden ferocity, gulping weed and lobsters and rip-toads and everything else, indiscriminately. These giants were males. Behind them swam a little group of females, rolling from side to side in the manner of pregnant cows to display their bulging flanks; and after them, by himself, the king of the herd, a dragon so big he looked like the upturned hull of some great capsized vessel, and that was only the half of him, for he let his haunches and tail dangle out of sight below the surface.

“Down and give praise,” said the eldest male, and fell to his knees.

With the seven long bony fingers of his outstretched left hand he made the sign of the sea dragon again and again: the fluttering wings, the swooping neck. He bent forward and rubbed his cheek against the cool moist sand. He lifted his head and looked toward the sea-dragon king, who now was no more than two hundred yards off shore, and tried by sheer force of will to urge the great beast toward the land.

—Come to us … come … come …

—Now is the time. We have waited so long. Come …save us … lead us … save us …

—Come!

10

With a mechanical flourish he signed his name to what seemed like the ten thousandth official document of the day: Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent. He scribbled the date next to his name, and one of Valentine’s secretaries selected another sheaf of papers and put it down in front of him.

This was Elidath’s day for signing things. It seemed to be a necessary weekly ordeal. Every Twoday afternoon since Lord Valentine’s departure he left his own headquarters in the Pinitor Court and came over to the Coronal’s official suite here in the inner Castle, and sat himself down at Lord Valentine’s magnificent desk, a great polished slab of deep red palisander with a vivid grain that resembled the starburst emblem, and for hours the secretaries took their turns handing him papers that had come up from the various branches of the government for final approval. Even with the Coronal off on his grand processional, the wheels continued to turn, the unending spew of decrees and revisions of decrees and abrogations of decrees poured forth. And everything had to be signed by the Coronal or his designated regent, the Divine only knew why. One more: Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent. And the date. There.

“Give me the next,” Elidath said.

In the beginning he had conscientiously tried to read, or at least to skim, every document before affixing his signature. Then he had settled for reading the little summary, eight or ten lines long, that each document bore clipped to its cover. But he had given up even that, long ago, Did Valentine read them all? he wondered. Impossible. Even if he read only the summaries, he would spend all his days and nights at it, with no time left to eat or sleep, let alone to carry out the real responsibilities of his office. By now Elidath signed most without even glancing at them. For all he knew or cared, he might be signing a proclamation forbidding the eating of sausages on Winterday, or one that made rainfall illegal in Stoienzar Province, or even a decree confiscating all his own lands and turning them over to the retirement fund for administrative secretaries. He signed anyway. A king—or a king’s understudy—must have faith in the competence of his staff, or the job becomes not merely overwhelming but downright unthinkable.

He signed. Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and—

“Next!”

He still felt a little guilty not reading them anymore. But did the Coronal really need to know that a treaty had been reached between the cities of Muldemar and Tidias, concerning the joint management of certain vineyards the title to which had been in dispute since the seventh year of the Pontifex Thimin and the Coronal Lord Kinniken? No. No. Sign and move on to other things, Elidath thought, and let Muldemar and Tidias rejoice in their new amity without troubling the king about it.

Elidath of Morvole—

As he reached for the next and began to search for the place to sign, a secretary said, “Sir, the lords Mirigant and Divvis are here.”

“Have them come in,” he replied without looking up.

Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent—

The lords Mirigant and Divvis, counsellors of the inner circle, cousin and nephew respectively of Lord Valentine, met him every afternoon about this time, so that he could go running with them through the streets of the Castle, and thereby purge his taut-nerved body of some of the tension that this regency was engendering in him. He had scarcely any other opportunity for exercise these days: the daily jaunt with them was an invaluable safety valve for him.

He managed to sign two more documents during the time that they were entering the huge room, so splendidly paneled with strips of bannikop and semotan and other rare woods, and making their way toward him with a clatter of booted feet against the elaborately inlaid floor. He picked up a third, telling himself that it would be the last one he’d do this day. It was merely a single sheet, and somehow Elidath found himself idly scanning it as he signed: a patent of nobility, no less, raising some fortunate commoner to the rank of Initiate Knight of Castle Mount, in recognition of his high merit and greatly valued services and this and that—

“What are you signing now?” Divvis asked, leaning across the desk and penciling at the paper in front of Elidath. He was a big, heavy-shouldered, dark-bearded man, who as he came into his middle years was taking on an eerie resemblance to his father, the former Coronal. “Is Valentine lowering taxes again? Or has he decided to make Carabella’s birthday a holiday?”

Accustomed though he was to Divvis’s brand of wit, Elidath had no taste for it after a day of such dreary meaningless work. Sudden anger flared in him. “Do you mean the Lady Carabella?” he snapped.

Divvis seemed startled. “Oh, are we so formal today, High Counsellor Elidath?”

“If I happened to refer to your late father simply as Voriax, I can imagine what you—”

“My father was Coronal,” said Divvis in a cold, tight voice, “and deserves the respect we give a departed king. Whereas the Lady Carabella is merely—”

“The Lady Carabella, cousin, is the consort of your present king,” said Mirigant sharply, turning on Divvis with more anger than Elidath had ever seen that kindly man display. “And also, I remind you, she is the wife of your father’s brother. For two reasons, then—”

“All right,” Elidath said wearily. “Enough of this foolishness. Are we going to run this afternoon?”

Divvis laughed. “If you’re not too tired from all this Coronaling you’ve been doing.”

“I’d like nothing better,” said Elidath, “to run down the Mount from here to Morvole, taking maybe five months of good easy striding to get there, and then to spend the next three years pruning my orchards and—ah! Yes, I’ll come running with you. Let me finish just this one last paper—”

“The Lady Carabella’s birthday holiday,” said Divvis, smiling.

“A patent of nobility,” Elidath said. “Which will, if you’ll keep quiet long enough, give us a new Knight-Initiate, a certain Hissune son of Elsinome, it says here, resident of the Pontifical Labyrinth, in recognition of his high merit and—”

“Hissune son of Elsinome?” Divvis whooped. “Do you know who that is, Elidath?”

“Why should I be expected to know any such thing?”

“Think back to Valentine’s restoration ceremony, when he insisted on having all those unlikely people with us in the Confalume throne room—his jugglers and the Skandar sea-captain with the missing arm and the Hjort with orange whiskers and the rest. Do you remember a boy there too?”

“Shanamir, you mean?”

“No, an even younger boy! A small skinny boy, ten or eleven years old, with no respect for anybody, a boy with the eyes of a thief, who went around asking embarrassing questions, and wheedling people into letting him have their medals and decorations, and pinning them all over his tunic and staring at himself endlessly in mirrors? That boy’s name was Hissune!”

“The little Labyrinth boy,” said Mirigant, “who made everyone promise to hire him as a guide if they ever came to the Labyrinth. I remember him, yes. A very clever rascal, I’d say.”

“That rascal is now a Knight-Initiate,” Divvis said. “Or will be, if Elidath doesn’t tear up that sheet of paper that he’s staring at so blankly. You aren’t going to approve this, are you, Elidath?”

“Of course I am.”

“A Knight-Initiate who comes from the Labyrinth?”

Elidath shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter to me if he was a Shapeshifter out of Ilirivoyne. I’m not here to overrule the Coronal’s decisions. If Valentine says Knight-Initiate, Knight-Initiate he is, whether he be rascal, fisherman, sausage peddler, Metamorph, dung sweeper—”

Quickly he inscribed the date beside his signature. “There. Done! Now the boy’s as noble as you are, Divvis.”

Divvis drew himself up pompously. “My father was the Coronal Lord Voriax. My grandfather was the High Counsellor Damiandane. My great-grandfather was—”

“Yes. We know all that. And I say, the boy is just as noble as you are now, Divvis. This paper says so. As some similar paper said for some ancestor of yours, I know not how long ago and certainly not why. Or do you think being noble is something innate, like Skandars having four arms and dark fur?”

“Your temper is short today, Elidath.”

“So it is. Therefore make allowances for me, and try not to be so tiresome.”

“Forgive me, then,” said Divvis, not very contritely.

Elidath stood and stretched and peered out the great curving window before the Coronal’s desk. It afforded a stupendous view into the open abyss of air that dropped away from the summit of Castle Mount on this side of the royal complex. Two mighty black raptors, wholly at home in these dizzying altitudes, flew in great arrogant arcs about one another out there, sunlight rebounding dazzlingly from the crest of glassy feathers on their golden heads, and Elidath, watching the easy unfettered movements of the huge birds, found himself envying their freedom to soar in those infinite spaces. He shook his head slowly. The day’s toil had left him groggy. Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent—

Six months this week, he thought, since Valentine had set out on the processional. It felt like years already. Was it like this to be Coronal? Such drudgery, such captivity? For a decade, now, he had lived with the possibility of becoming Coronal in his own right, for he was the clear and obvious next in line. That had been plain almost from the day Lord Voriax had been killed in the forest and the crown had so unexpectedly passed to his younger brother. If anything were to happen to Lord Valentine, Elidath knew, they would come to him with the starburst crown. Or if the Pontifex Tyeveras ever actually died and Valentine had to enter the Labyrinth, that too could make Elidath Coronal. Unless he was too old for the job by the time that occurred, for the Coronal must be a man of vigorous years, and Elidath was already past forty, and it looked as though Tyeveras would live forever.

If it came to him, he would not, could not, consider refusing. Refusing was unimaginable. But each passing year he found himself praying more fervently for continued long life for the Pontifex Tyeveras and a long healthy reign for the Coronal Lord Valentine. And these months as regent had only deepened those feelings. When he was a boy and this had been Lord Malibor’s Castle, it had seemed the most wondrous thing in the world to him to be Coronal, and his envy had been keen when Voriax, eight years his senior, was chosen upon Lord Malibor’s death. Now he was not quite so sure how wondrous it might be. But he would not refuse, if the crown came to him. He remembered the old High Counsellor Damiandane, father to Voriax and Valentine, saying once that the best one to choose as Coronal was one who was qualified for the crown, but did not greatly want it. Well, then, Elidath told himself cheerlessly, perhaps I am a good choice. But maybe it will not come to that.

“Shall we run?” he said with forced heartiness. “Five miles, and then some good golden wine?”

“Indeed,” said Mirigant.

As they made their way from the room, Divvis paused at the giant globe of bronze and silver, looming against the far wall, that bore the indicator of the Coronal’s travels. “Look,” he said putting his finger to the ruby sphere that glowed upon the surface of the globe like a rock-monkey’s bloodshot eye. “He’s well west of the Labyrinth already. What’s this river he’s sailing down? The Glayge, is it?”

“The Trey, I think,” said Mirigant. “He’s bound for Treymone, I imagine.”

Elidath nodded. He walked toward the globe and ran his hand lightly over its silken-smooth metal skin. “Yes. And Stoien from there, and then I suppose he’ll take ship across the Gulf to Perimor, and on up the coast as far as Alaisor.”

He could not lift his hand from the globe. He caressed the curving continents as though Majipoor were a woman and her breasts were Alhanroel and Zimroel. How beautiful the world, how beautiful this depiction of it! It was only a half-globe, really, for there was no need of representing the far side of Majipoor, which was all ocean and scarcely even explored. But on its one vast hemisphere the three continents were displayed. Alhanroel with the great jagged spire of Castle Mount jutting out into the room, and many-forested Zimroel, and the desert wasteland that was Suvrael down below, and the blessed Lady’s Isle of Sleep in the Inner Sea between them. Many of the cities were marked in detail, the mountain ranges, the larger lakes and rivers. Some mechanism Elidath did not understand tracked the Coronal at all times, and the glowing red sphere moved as the Coronal moved, so there could never be doubt of his whereabouts. As though in a trance Elidath traced out with his fingers the route of the grand processional, Stoien, Perimor, Alaisor, Sintalmond, Daniup, down through the Kinslain Gap into Santhiskion, and back by a winding course through the foothills to Castle Mount—

“You wish you were with him, don’t you?” Divvis asked.

“Or that you were making the trip in his place, eh?” said Mirigant.

Elidath whirled on the older man. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Flustered, Mirigant said, “It should be obvious.”

“You accuse me, I think, of an unlawful ambition.”

“Unlawful? Tyeveras has outlived his time by twenty years. He’s kept alive only by grace of some sort of magic—”

“By the finest of medical care, you mean,” Elidath said.

With a shrug Mirigant said, “It’s the same thing. In the natural order of things Tyeveras should long ago have been dead, and Valentine our Pontifex. And a new Coronal should be off undertaking his first grand processional.”

“These are not decisions for us to make,” Elidath grumbled.

Divvis said, “They are Valentine’s decisions, yes. And he will not make them.”

“He will, at the proper time.”

“When? Five more years? Ten? Forty?”

“Would you coerce the Coronal, Divvis?”

“I would advise the Coronal. It is our duty—yours, mine, Mirigant’s, Tunigorn’s, all of us who were in the government before the overthrow. We must tell him: it is time for him to move on to the Labyrinth.”

“I think it is time for us to have our run,” said Elidath stiffly.

“Listen to me, Elidath! Am I an innocent? My father was a Coronal; my grandfather held the post you hold now; I have spent all my life close to the heart of power. I understand things as well as most. We have no Pontifex. For eight or ten years we’ve merely had a thing more dead than alive, floating in that glass cage in the Labyrinth. Hornkast speaks to him, or pretends to, and receives decrees from him, or pretends to, but in effect there’s no Pontifex at all. How long can the government function that way? I think Valentine is trying to be Pontifex and Coronal both, which is impossible for any man to carry off, and so the whole structure is suffering, everything is paralyzed—”

“Enough,” Mirigant said.

“—and he will not move along to his proper office, because he’s young and hates the Labyrinth, and because he has come back from his exile with his new retinue of jugglers and herdboys, who are so captivated by the splendors of the Mount that they will not allow him to see that his true responsibility lies—”

“Enough!”

“One moment more,” said Divvis earnestly. “Are you blind, Elidath? Only eight years back we experienced something altogether unique in our history, when a lawful Coronal was overthrown without our knowing it, and an unanointed king put in his place. And what kind of man was that? A Metamorph puppet, Elidath! And the King of Dreams himself an actual Metamorph! Two of the four Powers of the Realm usurped, and this very Castle filled with Metamorph impostors—”

“All of them discovered and destroyed. And the throne bravely regained by its rightful holder, Divvis.”

“Indeed. Indeed. And do you think the Metamorphs have gone politely back to their jungles? I tell you, they are scheming right this instant to destroy Majipoor and take back for themselves whatever is left, which we have known since the moment of Valentine’s restoration, and what has he done about it? What has he done about it, Elidath? Stretched out his arms to them in love. Promised them that he will right ancient wrongs and remedy old injustices. Yes, and still they scheme against us!”

“I will run without you,” said Elidath. “Stay here, sit at the Coronal’s desk, sign those mounds of decrees. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Divvis? To sit at that desk?” He swung about angrily and started from the room.

“Wait,” Divvis said. “We’re coming.” He sprinted after Elidath, came up alongside him, caught him by the elbow. In a low intense tone quite different from his usual mocking drawl he declared, “I said nothing of the succession, except that it is necessary for Valentine to move on to the Pontificate. Do you think I would challenge you for the crown?”

“I am not a candidate for the crown,” said Elidath.

“No one is ever a candidate for the crown,” Divvis answered. “But even a child knows you are the heir presumptive. Elidath, Elidath—!”

“Let him be,” said Mirigant. “We are here to run, I thought.”

“Yes. Let us run, and no more of this talk for now,” said Divvis.

“The Divine be praised,” Elidath muttered.

He led the way down the flights of broad stone stairs, worn smooth by centuries of use, and out past the guardposts into Vildivar Close, the boulevard of pink granite blocks that linked the inner Castle, the Coronal’s primary working quarters, to the all but incomprehensible maze of outer buildings that surrounded it at the summit of the Mount. He felt as though a band of hot steel had been wrapped about his forehead. First to be signing a myriad foolish documents, then to have to listen to Divvis’s treasonous harangue—

Yet he knew Divvis to be right. The world could not much longer continue this way. When great actions needed to be undertaken, Pontifex and Coronal must consult with one another, and let their shared wisdom check all folly. But there was no Pontifex, in any real sense. And Valentine, attempting to operate alone, was failing. Not even the greatest of Coronals, not Confalume, not Prestimion, not Dekkeret, had presumed to try to rule Majipoor alone. And the challenges they had faced were as nothing compared with the one confronting Valentine. Who could have imagined, in Lord Confalume’s day, that the humble subjugated Metamorphs would ever rise again to seek redress for the loss of their world? Yet that uprising was well under way in secret places. Elidath was not likely ever to forget the last hours of the war of restoration, when he had fought his way into the vaults where the machines that controlled the climate of Castle Mount were kept, and to save those machines had had to slay troops clad in the uniform of the Coronal’s own guard—who as they died changed form and became slit-mouthed, noseless, slope-eyed Shapeshifters. That was eight years ago: and Valentine still hoped to reach that nation of malcontents with his love, and find some honorable peaceful way of healing their anger. But after eight years there were no concrete achievements to show; and who knew what new infiltration the Metamorphs had effected by now?

Elidath pulled breath deep into his lungs and broke into a furious pounding gallop, that left Mirigant and Divvis far behind within moments.

“Hoy!” Divvis called. “Is that your idea of jogging?”

He paid no attention. The pain within him could be burned away only by another kind of pain, and so he ran, in a frenzy, pushing himself to the limits of his strength. On, on, on, past the delicate five-peaked tower of Lord Arioc, past Lord Kinniken’s chapel, past the Pontifical guest-house. Down the Guadeloom Cascade, and around the squat black mass of Lord Prankipin’s treasury, and up the Ninety-Nine Steps, heart beginning to thunder in his breast, toward the vestibule of the Pinitor Court—on, on, through precincts he had traversed every day for thirty years, since as a child he had come here from Morvole at the foot of the Mount to be taught the arts of government. How many times he and Valentine had run like this, or Stasilaine or Tunigorn—they were close as brothers, the four of them, four wild boys roaring through Lord Malibor’s Castle, as it was known in those days—ah, how joyous life had been for them then! They had assumed they would be counsellors under Voriax when he became Coronal, as everyone knew would happen, but not for many years; and then Lord Malibor died much too early, and also Voriax who followed him, and to Valentine went the crown and nothing had ever been the same for any of them again.

And now? It is time for Valentine to move on to the Labyrinth, Divvis had said. Yes. Yes. Somewhat young to be Pontifex, yes, but that was the hard luck of coming to the throne in Tyeveras’s dotage. The old emperor deserved the sleep of the grave, and Valentine must go to the Labyrinth, and the starburst crown must descend—

To me? Lord Elidath? Is this to be Lord Elidath’s Castle?

The thought filled him with awe and wonder: and also with fear. He had seen, these past six months, what it was to be Coronal.

“Elidath! You’ll kill yourself! You’re running like a madman!” That was Mirigant’s voice, from far below, like something blown by the wind out of a distant city. Elidath was nearly at the top of the Ninety-Nine Steps now. There was a booming in his chest, and his vision was beginning to blur, but he forced himself onward, to the last of the steps, and into the narrow vestibule of dark green royal-stone that led to the administrative offices of the Pinitor Court. Blindly he careened around a corner, and felt a numbing impact and heard a heavy grunt; and then he fell and sprawled and lay breathing hard, more than half stunned.

He sat up and opened his eyes and saw someone—a youngish man, slender, dark of complexion, with fine black hair elaborately decked out in some fancy new style—getting shakily to his feet and coming toward him.

“Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

“Crashed into you, did I? Should have—looked where I was going—”

“I saw you, but there was no time. You came running so fast—here, let me help you up—”

“I’ll be fine, boy. Just need to—catch my breath—”

Disdaining the young man’s help, he pulled himself up, dusted off his doublet—there was a great rip up one knee, and bloody skin was showing through—and straightened his cloak. His heart was still thumping frighteningly, and he felt wholly absurd. Divvis and Mirigant were coming up the stairs, now. Turning to the young man, Elidath began to frame an apology, but the strange expression on the other’s face halted him.

“Is something wrong?” Elidath asked.

“Do you happen to be Elidath of Morvole, sir?”

“I do, yes.”

The boy laughed. “So I thought, when I took a close look. Why, you’re the one I was looking for, then! They said I might find you in the Pinitor Court. I bring a message for you.”

Mirigant and Divvis had entered the vestibule now. They came alongside Elidath, and from their look he knew he must be a frightful sight, flushed, sweating, half crazed from his lunatic run. He tried to make light of it, gesturing at the young man and saying, “It seems I ran down this messenger in my haste, and he’s bearing something for me. Who’s it from, boy?”

“Lord Valentine, sir.”

Elidath stared. “Is this a joke? The Coronal is on the grand processional, somewhere west of the Labyrinth.”

“So he is. I was with him in the Labyrinth, and when he sent me to the Mount he asked me to find you as the first thing I did, and tell you—”

“Well?”

He looked uneasily at Divvis and Mirigant. “I believe the message is for you alone, my lord.”

“These are the lords Mirigant and Divvis, of the Coronal’s own blood. You can speak in front of them.”

“Very well, sir. Lord Valentine instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole—I should say, sir, that I am the Knight-Initiate Hissune, son of Elsinome—instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole that he has changed his plan, that he is extending the grand processional to the continent of Zimroel as well, and also will visit his mother the Lady of the Isle before he returns, and that therefore you are requested to serve as regent throughout the full time of his absence. Which he estimates to be—”

“The Divine spare me!” Elidath whispered hoarsely.

“—a year or perhaps a year and a half beyond the time already planned,” said Hissune.

11

The second sign of trouble that Etowan Elacca noticed was the drooping leaves on the niyk trees, five days after the falling of the purple rain.

The purple rain itself was not the first sign of trouble. There was nothing uncommon about such a thing over on the eastern slope of the Dulorn Rift, where there were significant outcroppings of fluffy light skuvva-sand of a pale reddish-blue color. At certain seasons the wind from the north that was called the Chafer scoured the stuff free and hurled it high overhead, where it stained the clouds for days, and tinted the rainfall a fine lavender hue. It happened that the lands of Etowan Elacca were a thousand miles west of that district, on the other slope of the Rift entirely, just a short distance inland of Falkynkip; and winds laden with skuvva-sand were not known to blow that far west. But winds, Etowan Elacca knew, had a way of changing their courses, and perhaps the Chafer had chosen to visit a different side of the Rift this year. And in any event a purple rain was nothing to worry about: it merely left a fine coating of sand on everything, that was all, and the next normal rain washed it all away. No, the first sign of trouble was not the purple rain but the shriveling of the sensitivos in Etowan Elacca’s garden; and that happened two or three days before the rain.

Which was puzzling, but not really extraordinary. It was no great task to make sensitivos shrivel. They were small golden-leaved psychosensitive plants with insignificant green flowers, native to the forests west of Mazadone, and any sort of psychic discordance within the range of their receptors—angry shouting, or the growling of forest beasts in combat, or even, so it was said, the mere proximity of someone who had committed a serious crime—was sufficient to make their leaflets fold together like praying hands and turn black. It was not a response that seemed to have any particular biological benefit, Etowan Elacca had often thought; but doubtless it was a mystery that would unfold itself upon close examination, and someday he meant to make that examination. Meanwhile he grew the sensitivos in his garden because he liked the cheerful yellow glint of their leaves. And, because Etowan Elacca’s domain was a place of order and concord, never once in the time he had been growing them had his sensitivos undergone a withering—until now. That was the puzzle. Who could have exchanged unkind words at the border of his garden? What snarling animals, in this province of bland domesticated creatures, might have put the equilibrium of his estate into disarray?

Equilibrium was what Etowan Elacca prized above all else. He was a gentleman farmer, sixty years old, tall and straight-backed, with a full head of dazzling white hair. His father was the third son of the Duke of Massissa, and two of his brothers had served in succession as Mayor of Falkynkip, but government had never interested him: as soon as he came into his inheritance, he had purchased a lordly span of land in the placid rolling green countryside on the western rim of the Dulorn Rift, and there he had built a Majipoor in miniature, a little world, distinguished by its great beauty and its calm, level, harmonious spirit.

He raised the usual crops of the district: niyk and glein, hingamorts, stajja. Stajja was his mainstay, for there was never any wavering of demand for the sweet, buoyant bread that was made from stajja tubers, and the farms of the Rift were hard pressed to produce enough to meet the needs of Dulorn and Falkynkip and Pidruid, with close on thirty million people among them, and millions more in the outlying towns. Slightly upslope from the stajja fields was the glein plantation, row after row of dense, dome-shaped bushes ten feet high, between whose blade-shaped silvery leaves nestled great clusters of the plump, delicious little blue fruits. Stajja and glein were everywhere grown side by side: it had been discovered long ago that the roots of glein bushes seeped a nitrogenous fluid into the soil, which, when washed downslope by the rains, spurred the growth of stajja tubers.

Beyond the glein was the hingamort grove, where succulent, fungoid-looking yellow fingers, swollen with sugary juice, pushed up weirdly through the soil: light-seeking organs, they were, that carried energy to the plants buried far below. And all along the borders of the estate was Etowan Elacca’s glorious orchard of niyk trees, in groups of five laid out, as was the custom, in intricate geometrical patterns. He loved to walk among them and slide his hands lovingly over their slim black trunks, no thicker than a man’s arm and smoother than fine satin. A niyk tree lived only ten years: in the first three it grew with astonishing swiftness to its forty-foot height, in the fourth it bore for the first time its stunning cup-shaped golden flowers, blood-red at the center, and from then on it yielded an abundance of translucent, crescent-shaped, tart-flavored white fruits, until the moment of its death came suddenly upon it and within hours the graceful tree became a dried husk that a child could snap in half. The fruit, though poisonous when raw, was indispensable in the sharp, harsh stews and porridges favored in the Ghayrog cuisine. Only in the Rift did niyk grow really well, and Etowan Elacca enjoyed a steady market for his crop.

Farming provided Etowan Elacca with a sense of usefulness; but it did not fully satisfy his love of beauty. For that he had created on his property a private botanical garden where he had assembled a wondrous ornamental display, taking from all parts of the world every fascinating plant that could thrive in the warm, moist climate of the Rift.

Here were alabandinas both of Zimroel and Alhanroel, in all the natural colors and most of the hybrids as well. Here were tanigales and thwales, and nightflower trees from the Metamorph forests, that at midnight on Winterday alone produced their brief, stupefying display of brilliance. Here were pinninas and androdragmas, bubblebush and rubbermoss, halatingas grown from cuttings obtained on Castle Mount, and caramangs, muornas, sihornish vines, sefitongals, eldirons. He experimented also with such difficult things as fireshower palms from Pidruid, which sometimes lived six or seven seasons for him, but would never flower this far from the sea, and needle trees of the high country, which waned quickly without the chill they required, and the strange ghostly moon-cactus of the Velalisier Desert, which he tried in vain to shelter from the too-frequent rains. Nor did Etowan Elacca ignore the plants native to his own region of Zimroel, merely because they were less exotic: he grew the odd bloated bladdertrees that swayed, buoyant as balloons, on their swollen stems, and the sinister carnivorous mouthplants of the Mazadone forests, and singing ferns, cabbage trees, a couple of enormous dwikkas, half a dozen prehistoric-looking fern trees. By way of ground cover he used little clumps of sensitivos wherever it seemed appropriate, for their shy and delicate nature seemed a suitable contrast to the gaudier and more assertive plants that were the core of his collection.

The day he discovered the withering of the sensitivos had begun in more than ordinary splendor. Last night there had been light rain; but the showers had moved on, Etowan Elacca perceived, as he set forth on his customary stroll through his garden at dawn, and the air was cloudless and unusually clear, so that the rising sun struck startling green fire from the shining granite hills to the west. The alabandina blossoms glistened; the mouthplants, awakening and hungry, restlessly clashed the blades and grinders that lay half-submerged in the deep cups at the hearts of their huge rosettes; tiny crimson-winged longbeaks fluttered like sparks of dazzling light through the branches of the androdragmas. But for all that he had an odd sense of foreboding—he had dreamed badly the night before, of scorpions and dhiims and other vermin burrowing in his fields—and it was almost without surprise that he came upon the poor sensitivos, charred and crumpled from some torment of the dark hours.

For an hour before breakfast he worked alone, grimly ripping out the damaged plants. They were still alive below the injured branches, but there was no saving them, for the withered foliage would never regenerate, and if he were to cut it away the shock of the pruning would kill the lower parts. So he pulled them out by the dozens, shuddering to feel the plants writhing at his touch, and built a bonfire of them. Afterward he called his head gardener and his foremen together in the sensitivo grove and asked if anyone knew what had happened to upset the plants so. But no one had any idea.

The incident left him gloomy all morning, but it was not Etowan Elacca’s nature to remain downcast for long, and by afternoon he had obtained a hundred packets of sensitivo seeds from the local nursery: he could not buy the plants themselves, of course, since they would never survive a transplanting. He spent the next day planting the seeds himself. In six or eight weeks there would be no sign of what had occurred. He regarded the event as no more than a minor mystery, which perhaps he would someday solve, more likely not; and he put the matter from his mind.

A day or two later came another oddity: the purple rain. A strange event, but harmless. Everyone said the same thing: “Winds must be changing, to blow the skuvva this far west!” The stain lasted less than a day, and then another rainshower, of a more usual kind, rinsed everything clean. That event, too, Etowan Elacca put quickly from his mind.

The niyk trees, though—

He was supervising the plucking of the glein fruit, some days after the purple rain, when the senior foreman, a leathery-looking, unexcitable Ghayrog named Simoost, came to him in what was, for Simoost, amazing agitation—serpentine hair madly tangling, forked tongue flickering as though trying to escape from his mouth—and cried, “The niyk! The niyk!”

The grayish-white leaves of niyk trees are pencil-shaped, and stand erect in sparse clumps at the ends of black two-inch stems, as though they had been turned upright by some sudden electric shock. Since the tree is so slender and its branches are so few and angular, this upturning of the leaves gives it a curious thorny look that makes a niyk tree unmistakable even at a great distance. Now, as Etowan Elacca ran with Simoost toward the grove, he saw while still hundreds of yards away that something had occurred that he would not have thought possible: every leaf on every niyk tree had turned downward, as though they were not niyks but some sort of weeping tanigale or halatinga!

“Yesterday they were fine,” Simoost said. “This morning they were fine! But now—now—”

Etowan Elacca reached the first group of five niyks and put his hand to the nearest trunk. It felt strangely light; he pushed and the tree gave way, dry roots ripping easily from the ground. He pushed a second, a third.

“Dead,” he said.

“The leaves—” said Simoost. “Even a dead niyk still keeps its leaves facing up. Yet these—I’ve never seen anything like this—”

“Not a natural death,” Etowan Elacca murmured. “Something new, Simoost.”

He ran from group to group, shoving the trees over; and by the third group he was no longer running, and by the fifth he was walking very slowly indeed, with his head bowed.

“Dead—all dead—my beautiful niyks—”

The whole grove was gone. They had died as niyks die, swiftly, all moisture fleeing their spongy stems; but an entire grove of niyks planted in staggered fashion over a ten-year cycle should not die all at once, and the strange behavior of the leaves was inexplicable.

“We’ll have to report this to the agricultural agent,” Etowan Elacca said. “And send messengers too, Simoost, to Hagidawn’s farm, and Nismayne’s, and what’s-his-name by the lake—find out if they’ve had trouble with their niyks too. Is it a plague, I wonder? But niyks have no diseases—a new plague, Simoost? Coming upon us like a sending of the King of Dreams?”

“The purple rain, sir—”

“A little colored sand? How could that harm anything? They have purple rain a dozen times a year on the other side of the Rift, and it doesn’t bother their crops. Oh, Simoost, my niyks, my niyks—!”

“It was the purple rain,” said Simoost firmly. “That was not the rain of the eastern lands. It was something new, sir: it was poison rain, and it killed the niyks!”

“And killed the sensitivos too, three days before it actually fell?”

“They are very delicate, sir. Perhaps they felt the poison in the air, as the rain was coming toward us.”

Etowan Elacca shrugged. Perhaps. Perhaps. And perhaps the Shapeshifters have been flying up from Piurifayne on broomsticks or magical flying machines in the night, and scattering some baleful enchantment on the land. Perhaps. In the world of perhaps anything at all was possible.

“What good is speculating?” he asked bitterly. “We know nothing. Except that the sensitivos have died, and the niyk trees have died. What will be next, Simoost? What will be next?”

12

Carabella, who had been staring all day out of the window of the floater car as though she hoped somehow to speed the journey through this bleak wasteland by the force of her eyes, called out in sudden glee, “Look, Valentine! I think we’re actually coming out of the desert!”

“Surely not yet,” he said. “Surely not for three or four more days. Or five, or six, or seven—”

“Will you look?”

He put down the packet of dispatches through which he had been leafing, and sat up and peered past her. Yes! By the Divine, it was green out there! And not the grayish green of twisted scruffy stubborn pathetic desert plants, but the rich, vibrant green of real Majipoori vegetation, throbbing with the energies of growth and fertility. So at last he was beyond the malign spell of the Labyrinth, now that the royal caravan was emerging from the parched tableland in which the subterranean capital was situated. Duke Nascimonte’s territory must be coming near—Lake Ivory, Mount Ebersinul, the fields of thuyol and milaile, the great manor-house of which Valentine had heard so much—

Lightly he rested his hand on Carabella’s slender shoulder and drew his fingers along her back, digging gently into the firm bands of muscle in what was in part a massage, in part a caress. How good it was to have her with him again! She had joined him on the processional a week ago, at the Velalisier ruins, where together they had inspected the progress the archaeologists were making at uncovering the enormous stone city that the Metamorphs had abandoned fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Her arrival had done much to lift him from his bleak and cheerless mood.

“Ah, lady, it was a lonely business without you in the Labyrinth,” he said softly.

“I wish I could have been there. I know how you hate that place. And when they told me you’d been ill—oh, I felt such guilt and shame, knowing I was far away when you—when you—” Carabella shook her head. “I would have been with you, if it had been possible. You know that, Valentine.

But I had promised the people in Stee that I would attend the dedication of their new museum, and—”

“Yes. Of course. The consort of the Coronal has her own responsibilities.”

“It seems so strange to me, still. ‘The consort of the Coronal’—! The little juggler girl from Til-omon, running around Castle Mount making speeches and dedicating museums—”

“’The little juggler girl from Til-omon,’ still, after so many years, Carabella?”

She shrugged and ran her hands through her fine, close-cropped dark hair. “My life has been only a chain of strange accidents, and how can I ever forget that? If I hadn’t been staying at that inn with Zalzan Kavol’s juggling troupe when you came wandering in—and if you hadn’t been robbed of your memory and dumped down in Pidruid with no more guile to you than a black-nosed blave—”

“Or if you had been born in Lord Havilbove’s time, or on some other world—”

“Don’t tease me, Valentine.”

“Sorry, love.” He took her small cool hand between both of his. “But how long will you go on looking backward at what you once were? When will you let yourself truly accept the life you lead now?”

“I think I never will truly accept it,” she said distantly.

“Lady of my life, how can you say—”

“You know why, Valentine.”

He closed his eyes a moment. “I tell you again, Carabella, you are beloved on the Mount by every knight, every prince, every lord—you have their devotion, their admiration, their respect, their—”

“I have Elidath’s, yes. And Tunigorn’s, and Stasilaine’s, and others of that kind. Those who truly love you love me also. But to many of the others I remain an upstart, a commoner, an intruder, an accident—a concubine—”

“Which others?”

“You know them, Valentine.”

“Which others?”

“Divvis,” she said, after some hesitation. “And the little lords and knights in Divvis’s faction. And others. The Duke of Halanx spoke mockingly of me to one of my own ladies-in-waiting—Halanx, Valentine, your native city! Prince Manganot of Banglecode. And there are more.” She turned to him, and he saw the anguish in her dark eyes. “Am I imagining these things? Am I hearing whispers where it’s only the rustling of the leaves? Oh, Valentine, sometimes I think that they’re right, that a Coronal should not have married a commoner. I’m not one of them. I never will be. My lord, I must be so much grief for you—”

“You are joy to me, and nothing other than joy. Ask Sleet what my mood was like last week when I was in the Labyrinth, and how I’ve been since you joined me on this journey. Ask Shanamir—Tunigorn—anyone, anyone at all—”

“I know, love. You looked so dark, so grim the day I arrived. I barely recognized you, with that frown, with those glowering eyes.”

“A few days with you heals me of anything.”

“And yet I think you are still not yourself entirely. Is it that you still have the Labyrinth too much with you? Or perhaps it’s the desert that’s depressing you. Or the ruins.”

“No, I think not.”

“What is it, then?”

He studied the landscape beyond the floater window, noting its increasing greenness, the gradual encroachment of trees and grass as the terrain grew more hilly. That should have cheered him more than it did. But there was a weight on his soul that he could not shed.

After a moment he said, “The dream, Carabella—that vision, that omen—there’s no way I can rid my mind of that. Ah, what a page I’ll have in history! The Coronal who lost his throne and became a juggler, and got back his throne, and afterward governed foolishly, and allowed the world to collapse into chaos and madness—ah, Carabella, Carabella, is that what I’m doing? After fourteen thousand years, am I to be the last Coronal? Will there be anyone even to write my history, do you think?”

“You have never governed foolishly, Valentine.”

“Am I not too gentle, too even-tempered, too eager to see both sides of an issue?”

“Those are not faults.”

“Sleet thinks they are. Sleet feels that my dread of warfare, of any sort of violence, leads me on the wrong path. He’s told me so in almost so many words.”

“But there’ll be no warfare, my lord.”

“That dream—”

“I think you take that dream too literally.”

“No,” he said. “Such talk gives me only idle comfort. Tisana and Deliamber agree with me that we stand on the brink of some great calamity, perhaps a war. And Sleet: he’s convinced of it. He’s made up his mind that it’s the Metamorphs who are about to rise against us, the holy war that they’ve been planning, he says, for seven thousand years.”

“Sleet is too bloodthirsty. And he has had an irrational fear of Shapeshifters since he was a young man. You know that.”

“When we recaptured the Castle eight years ago and found it full of disguised Metamorphs, was that just a delusion?”

“What they tried to do back then ultimately failed, did it not?”

“And will they never try again?”

“If your policies succeed, Valentine—”

“My policies! What policies? I reach toward the Metamorphs and they slide beyond my grasp! You know that I hoped to have half a dozen Metamorph chieftains by my side when we toured Velalisier last week. So that they could observe how we’ve restored their sacred city, and see the treasures we’ve found, and perhaps take the holiest objects with them back to Piurifayne. But I had no response from them, not even a refusal, Carabella.”

“You were aware that the Velalisier excavations might create complications. Perhaps they resent our even entering the place, let alone trying to put it back together. Isn’t there a legend that they plan to rebuild it themselves some day?”

“Yes,” said Valentine somberly. “After they’ve regained control of Majipoor and driven us all from their world. So Ermanar once told me. All right: maybe inviting them to Velalisier was a mistake. But they’ve ignored all my other overtures, too. I write to their queen the Danipiur in Ilirivoyne, and if she replies at all, it’s in letters of three sentences, cold, formal, empty—” He drew in his breath deeply. “Enough of all this misery, Carabella! There’ll be no war. I’ll find a way to break through the hatred the Shapeshifters feel for us, and win them to my side. And as for the lords of the Mount who’ve been snubbing you, if indeed they have—I beg you, ignore them. Snub them back! What is a Divvis to you, or a Duke of Halanx? Fools, is all they are.” Valentine smiled. “I’ll soon give them worse things to worry about, love, than my consort’s pedigree!”

“What do you mean?”

“If they object to having a commoner for the Coronal’s consort,” said Valentine, “how will they feel when they have a commoner for their Coronal?”

Carabella looked at him in bewilderment. “I understand none of this, Valentine.”

“You will. In time, you’ll understand all. I mean to work such changes in the world—oh, love, when they write the history of my reign, if Majipoor survives long enough for that history to be written, they’ll need more than one volume for it, I promise you! I will do such things—such earthshaking things—” He laughed. “What do you think, Carabella? Listen to me ranting! The good Lord Valentine of the gentle soul turns the world upside down! Can he do it? Can he actually bring it off?”

“My lord, you mystify me. You speak in riddles.”

“Perhaps so.”

“You give me no clue to the answer.”

He said, after a moment’s pause, “The answer to the riddle, Carabella, is Hissune.”

“Hissune? Your little Labyrinth urchin?”

“An urchin no longer. A weapon, now, which I have hurled toward the Castle.”

She sighed. “Riddles and still more riddles!”

“It’s a royal privilege to speak in mysteries.” Valentine winked and pulled her toward him, and brushed his lips lightly against hers. “Allow me this little indulgence. And—”

The floater came suddenly to a halt.

“Hoy, look! We’ve arrived!” he cried. “There’s Nascimonte! And—by the Lady, I think he’s got half his province out here to greet us!”

The caravan had pulled up in a broad meadow of short dense grass so dazzlingly green it seemed some other color altogether, some unworldly hue from the far end of the spectrum. Under the brilliant midday sun a great celebration was already in progress that might have stretched for miles, tens of thousands of people holding carnival as far as the eye could see. To the booming sound of cannons and the shrill jangling melodies of sistirons and double-chorded galistanes, volley after volley of day-fireworks rose overhead, sketching stunning hard-edged patterns in black and violet against the clear bright sky. Stilt walkers twenty feet tall, wearing huge clown-masks with swollen red foreheads and gigantic noses, frolicked through the crowd. Great posts had been erected from which starburst banners rippled joyously in the light summer breeze; half a dozen orchestras at once, on half a dozen different bandstands, burst loose with anthems and marches and chorales; and a veritable army of jugglers had been assembled, probably anyone in six hundred leagues who had the slightest skill, so that the air was thick with clubs and knives and hatchets and blazing torches and gaily colored balls and a hundred other sorts of objects, flying back and forth in tribute to Lord Valentine’s beloved pastime. After the gloom and murk of the Labyrinth, this was the most splendid imaginable recommencement of the grand processional: frantic, overwhelming, a trifle ridiculous, altogether delightful.

In the midst of it all, waiting calmly near the place where the caravan of floaters had come to rest, was a tall, gaunt man of late middle years, whose eyes were bright with a strange intensity and whose hard-featured face was set in the most benevolent of smiles. This was Nascimonte, landowner turned bandit turned landowner again, once self-styled Duke of Vornek Crag and Overlord of the Western Marches, now by proclamation of Lord Valentine more properly ennobled with the title of Duke of Ebersinul.

“Oh, will you look!” Carabella cried, struggling to get the words out through her laughter. “He’s Wearing his bandit costume for us!”

Valentine nodded, grinning.

When first he had encountered Nascimonte, in the forlorn nameless ruins of some Metamorph city in the desert southwest of the Labyrinth, the highwayman duke was decked out in a bizarre jacket and leggings fashioned from the thick red fur of some ratty little desert creature, and a preposterous yellow fur cap. That was when, bankrupted and driven from his estates by the callous destructiveness of the followers of the false Lord Valentine as they passed through this region while the usurper was making his grand processional, Nascimonte had taken up the practice of robbing wayfarers in the desert. Now his lands were his own again, and he could dress, if he chose, in silks and velvets, and array himself with amulets and feather-masks and eye-jewels, but there he was in the same scruffy absurd garb he had favored during his time of exile. Nascimonte had always been a man of great style: and, Valentine thought, such a nostalgic choice of raiment on such a day as this was nothing if not a show of style.

It was years since last Valentine and Nascimonte had met. Unlike most of those who had fought beside Valentine in the final days of the war of restoration, Nascimonte had not cared to accept an appointment to the Coronal’s councils on Castle Mount, but had wanted only to return to his ancestral land in the foothills of Mount Ebersinul, just above Lake Ivory. Which had been difficult to achieve, since title to the land had passed legitimately to others since Nascimonte’s illegitimate losing of it; but the government of Lord Valentine had devoted much time in the early years of the restoration to such puzzles, and eventually Nascimonte had regained all that had been his.

Valentine wanted nothing more than to rush from his floater and embrace his old comrade-at-arms. But of course protocol forbade that: he could not simply plunge into this wild crowd as though he were just an ordinary free citizen.

Instead he had to wait while the ponderous ceremony of the arraying of the Coronal’s guard took place: the great burly shaggy Skandar, Zalzan Kavol, who was the chief of his guards, shouting and waving his four arms officiously about, and the men and women in their impressive green-and-gold uniforms emerging from their floaters and forming a living enfilade to hold back the gaping populace, and the royal musicians setting up the royal anthem, and much more like that, until at last Sleet and Tunigorn came to the royal floater and opened its royal doors to allow the Coronal and his consort to step forth into the golden warmth of the day.

And then at last, to walk between the double rows of guards with Carabella on his arm to a point halfway toward Nascimonte, and there to wait while the Duke advanced, and bowed and made the starburst gesture, and most solemnly bowed again to Carabella—

And Valentine laughed and came forward and took the gaunt old bandit into his arms, and held him tight, and then they marched together through the parting crowd toward the reviewing stand that surmounted the festival.

Now began a grand parade of the kind customary to a visit of the Coronal, with musicians and jugglers and acrobats and tandy-prancers and clowns and wild animals of the most terrifying aspect, which were not in fact wild at all, but carefully bred for tameness; and along with these performers came all the general citizenry, marching in a kind of glorious random way, crying out as they passed the stand, “Valentine! Valentine! Lord Valentine!”

And the Coronal smiled, and waved, and applauded, and otherwise did what a Coronal on processional must do, which is to radiate joy and cheer and a sense of the wholeness of the world. This he found now to be unexpectedly difficult work, for all the innate sunniness of his nature: the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in the Labyrinth still shadowed him with inexplicable despond. But his training prevailed, and he smiled, and waved, and applauded for hours.

The afternoon passed and the festive mood ebbed, for even in the presence of the Coronal how can people cheer and salute with the same intensity for hour after hour? After the rush of excitement came the part Valentine liked least, when he saw in the eyes of those about him that intense probing curiosity, and he was reminded that a king is a freak, a sacred monster, incomprehensible and even terrifying to those who know him only as a title, a crown, an ermine robe, a place in history. That part, too, had to be endured, until at last all the parade had gone by, and the din of merrymaking had given way to the quieter sound of a wearying crowd, and the bronze shadows lengthened, and the air grew cool.

“Shall we go now to my home, lordship?” Nascimonte asked.

“I think it is time,” said Valentine.

Nascimonte’s manor-house proved to be a bizarre and wonderful structure that lay against an outcropping of pink granite like some vast featherless flying creature briefly halting to rest. In truth it was nothing more than a tent, but a tent of such size and strangeness as Valentine had never imagined. Some thirty or forty lofty poles upheld great outswooping wings of taut dark cloth that rose to startling steep peaks, then subsided almost to ground level, and went climbing again at sharp angles to form the chamber adjoining. It seemed as though the house could be disassembled in an hour and moved to some other hillside; and yet there was great strength and majesty to it, a paradoxical look of permanence and solidity within its airiness and lightness.

Inside, that look of permanence and solidity was manifest, for thick carpeting in the Milimorn style, dark green shot through with scarlet, had been woven to the underside of the roof canvas to give it a rich, vivid texture, and the heavy tentpoles were banded with glittering metal, and the flooring was of pale violet slate, cut thin and buffed to a keen polish. The furnishings were simple—divans, long massive tables, some old-fashioned armoires and chests, and not much else, but everything sturdy and in its way regal.

“Is this house anything like the one the usurper’s men torched?” Valentine asked, when he was alone with Nascimonte a short while after they had entered.

“In construction, identical in all respects, my lord. The original, you know, was designed by the first and greatest Nascimonte, six hundred years ago. When we rebuilt, we used the old plans, and altered nothing. I reclaimed some of the furnishings from the creditors and duplicated the others. The plantation too—everything is just as it was before they came and carried out their drunken wrecking. The dam has been rebuilt, the fields have been drained, the fruit trees replanted: five years of constant toil, and now at last the havoc of that awful week is undone. All of which I owe to you, my lord. You have made me whole again—you have made all the world whole again—”

“And so may it remain, I pray.”

“And so it shall, my lord.”

“Ah, do you think so, Nascimonte? Do you think we are out of our troubles yet?”

“My lord, what troubles?” Nascimonte lightly touched the Coronal’s arm, and led him to a broad porch from which there was a magnificent prospect of all his property. By the twilight glow and the soft radiance of drifting yellow glowfloats tethered in the trees, Valentine saw a long sweep of lawn leading down to elegantly maintained fields and gardens, and beyond it the serene crescent of Lake Ivory, on whose bright surface the many peaks and crags of Mount Ebersinul, dominating the scene, were indistinctly mirrored. There was the faint sound of distant music, the twanging of gardolans, perhaps, and some voices raised in the last gentle songs of the long festal afternoon. All was peace and prosperity out there. “When you look upon this, my lord, can you believe that trouble exists in the world?”

“I take your point, old friend. But there is more to the world than what we can see from your porch.”

“It is the most peaceful of worlds, my lord.”

“So it has been, for thousands of years. But how much longer will that long peace endure?”

Nascimonte stared, as though seeing Valentine for the first time that day.

“My lord?”

“Do I sound gloomy, Nascimonte?”

“I’ve never seen you so somber, my lord. I could almost believe that the trick has been played again, that a false Valentine has been substituted for the one I knew.”

With a thin smile Valentine said, “I am the true Valentine. But a very tired one, I think.”

“Come, I’ll show you to your chamber, and there will be dinner when you’re ready, a quiet one, only my family and a few guests from town, no more than twenty at the most, and thirty more of your people—”

“That sounds almost intimate, after the Labyrinth,” said Valentine lightly.

He followed Nascimonte through the dark and mysterious windings of the manor-house to a wing set apart on the high eastern arm of the cliff. Here, behind a formidable barricade of Skandar guards that included Zalzan Kavol himself, was the royal suite. Valentine, bidding his host farewell, entered and found Carabella alone within, stretched languidly in a sunken tub of delicate blue and gold Ni-moyan tile, her slender body dimly visible beneath a curious crackling haze at the surface of the water.

“This is astonishing!” she said. “You ought to come in with me, Valentine.”

“Most gladly I will, lady!”

He kicked off his boots, peeled away his doublet, tossed his tunic aside, and with a grateful sigh slipped into the tub beside her. The water was effervescent, almost electrical, and now that he was in it he saw a faint glow playing over its surface. Closing his eyes, he stretched back and put his head against the smooth tiled rim, and curled his arm around Carabella to draw her against him. Lightly he kissed her forehead, and then, as she turned toward him, the briefly exposed tip of one small round breast.

“What have they put in the water?” he asked.

“It comes from a natural spring. The chamberlain called it ‘radioactivity.’ ”

“I doubt that,” said Valentine. “Radioactivity is something else, something very powerful and dangerous. I’ve studied it, so I believe.”

“What is it like, if not like this?”

“I can’t say. The Divine be blessed, we have none of it on Majipoor, whatever it may be. But if we did, I think we’d not be taking baths in it. This must be some lively kind of mineral water.”

“Very likely,” Carabella said.

They bathed together in silence awhile. Valentine felt the vitality returning to his spirit. The tingling water? The comforting presence of Carabella close by, and the freedom at last from the press of courtiers and followers and admirers and petitioners and cheering citizens? Yes, and yes, those things could only help to bring him back from his brooding, and also his innate resilience must be manifesting itself at last, drawing him forth from that strange and un-Valentine-like darkness that had oppressed him since entering the Labyrinth. He smiled. Carabella lifted her lips to his; and his hands slipped down the sleekness of her lithe body, to her lean muscular midsection, to the strong supple muscles of her thighs.

“In the bath?” she asked dreamily.

“Why not? This water is magical.”

“Yes. Yes.”

She floated above him. Her legs straddled him; her eyes, half open, met his for a moment, then closed. Valentine caught her taut little buttocks and guided her against him. Was it ten years, he wondered, since that first night in Pidruid, in that moonlit glade, under the high gray-green bushes, after the festival for that other Lord Valentine? Hard to imagine: ten years. And the excitement of her had never waned for him. He locked his arms about her, and they moved in rhythms that had grown familiar but never routine, and he ceased to think of that first time or of all the times since, or of anything, indeed, but warmth and love and happiness.

Afterward, as they dressed for Nascimonte’s intimate dinner for fifty guests, she said, “Are you serious about making Hissune Coronal?”

“What?”

“I think that that surely was the meaning of what you were saying earlier—those riddles of yours, just as we arrived at the festival, do you recall?”

“I recall,” Valentine said.

“If you prefer not to discuss—”

“No. No. I see no reason to hide this matter from you any longer.”

“So you are serious!”

Valentine frowned. “I think he could be Coronal, yes. It’s a thought that first crossed my mind when he was just a dirty little boy hustling for crowns and royals in the Labyrinth.”

“But can an ordinary person become Coronal?”

“You, Carabella, who were a street-juggler, and are now consort to the Coronal, can ask that?”

“You fell in love with me and made a rash and unusual choice. Which has not been accepted, as you know, by everyone.”

“Only by a few foolish lordlings! You’re hailed by all the rest of the world as my true lady.”

“Perhaps. But in my case the consort is not the Coronal. And the common people will never accept one of their own as Coronal. To them the Coronal is royal, sacred, almost divine. So I felt, when I was down there among them, in my former life.”

“You are accepted. He will be accepted too.”

“It seems so arbitrary—picking a boy out of nowhere, raising him to such a height. Why not Sleet? Zalzan Kavol? Anyone at random?”

“Hissune has the capacity. That I know.”

“I am no judge of that. But the idea that that ragged little boy will wear the crown seems terribly strange to me, too strange even to be something out of a dream.”

“Does the Coronal always have to come from the same narrow clique on Castle Mount? That’s how it’s been; yes, for hundreds of years—thousands, perhaps. The Coronal always selected from one of the great families of the Mount: or even when he is not of one of those, and I could not just now tell you when we last went outside the Mount for the choice, he has been highborn, invariably, the son of princes and dukes. I think that was not how our system was originally designed, or else why are we forbidden to have hereditary monarchs? And now such vast problems are coming to the surface, Carabella, that we must turn away from the Mount for answers. We are too isolated up there. We understand less than nothing, I often think. The world is in peril: it’s time now for us to be reborn, to give the crown to someone truly from the outside world, someone not part of our little self-perpetuating aristocracy—someone with another perspective, who has seen the view from below—”

“He’s so young, though!”

“Time will take care of that,” said Valentine. “I know there are many who think I should already have become Pontifex, but I will go on disappointing them as long as I can. The boy must have his full training first. Nor will I pretend, as you know, any eagerness to hurry onward to the Labyrinth.”

“No,” Carabella said. “And we talk as though the present Pontifex is already dead, or at death’s door. But Tyeveras still lives.”

“He does, yes,” said Valentine. “At least in certain senses of the word. Let him continue to live some while longer, I pray.”

“And when Hissune is ready—?”

“Then I’ll let Tyeveras rest at last.”

“I find it hard to imagine you as Pontifex, Valentine.”

“I find it even harder, love. But I will do it, because I must. Only not soon: not soon, is what I ask!”

After a pause Carabella said, “You will unsettle Castle Mount for certain, if you do this thing. Isn’t Elidath supposed to be the next Coronal!”

“He is very dear to me.”

“You’ve called him the heir presumptive yourself, many times.”

“So I have,” Valentine said. “But Elidath has changed, since we first had our training together. You know, love, anyone who desperately wants to be Coronal is plainly unfit for the throne. But one must at least be willing. One must have a sense of calling, an inner fire of a sort. I think that fire has gone out, in Elidath.”

“You thought it had gone out in yourself, when you were juggling and first were told you had a higher destiny.”

“But it returned, Carabella, as my old self reentered my mind! And it remains. I often weary of my crown—but I think I’ve never regretted having it.”

“And Elidath would?”

“So I suspect. He’s playing at being Coronal now, while I’m away. My guess is that he doesn’t like it much. Besides, he’s past forty. The Coronal should be a young man.”

“Forty is still young, Valentine,” said Carabella with a grin.

He shrugged. “I hope it is, love. But I remind you that if I have my way, there’ll be no cause to name a new Coronal for a long time. And by then, I think, Hissune will be prepared and Elidath will step gracefully aside.”

“Will the other lords of the Mount be as graceful, though?”

“They will have to be,” said Valentine. He offered her his arm. “Come: Nascimonte is waiting for us.”

13

Because it was the fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, which was the holy day that commemorated the exodus from the ancient capital beyond the sea, there was an important obeisance to perform before Faraataa could begin the task of making contact with his agents in the outlying provinces.

It was the time of the year in Piurifayne when the rains came twice daily, once at the hour before dawn, once at twilight. It was necessary to make the Velalisier ritual in darkness but also in dryness, and so Faraataa had instructed himself to awaken at the hour of the night that is known as the Hour of the Jackal, when the sun still rests upon Alhanroel in the east.

Without disturbing those who slept near him, he made his way out of the flimsy wicker cottage that they had constructed the day before—Faraataa and his followers kept constantly on the move; it was safest that way—and slipped into the forest. The air was moist and thick, as always, but there was no scent yet of the morning rains.

He saw, by the glitter of starlight coming through rifts in the clouds, other figures moving also toward the jungle depths. But he did not acknowledge them, nor they him. The Velalisier obeisance was performed alone: a private ritual for a public grief. One never spoke of it; one simply did it, on the fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, and when one’s children were of age one instructed them in the manner of doing it, but always with shame, always with sorrow. That was the Way.

He walked into the forest for the prescribed three hundred strides. That brought him to a grove of slender towering gibaroons; but he could not pray properly here, because aerial clumps of gleam-bells dangled from every crotch and pucker of their trunks, casting a sharp orange glow. Not far away he spied a majestic old dwikka tree, standing by itself, that had been gouged by lightning some ages ago: a great cavernous charred scar, covered along its edges by regrown red bark, offered itself to him as a temple. The light of the gleam-bells would not penetrate there.

Standing naked in the shelter of the dwikka’s huge scar, he performed first the Five Changes.

His bones and muscles flowed, his skin cells modified themselves, and he became the Red Woman; and after her, the Blind Giant; and then the Flayed Man; and in the fourth of the Changes he took on the form of the Final King; and then, drawing breath deeply and calling upon all his power, he became the Prince To Come. For Faraataa, the Fifth Change was the deepest struggle: it required him to alter not only the outer lineaments of his body but the contours of the soul itself, from which he had to purge all hatred, all hunger for vengeance, all lust for destruction. The Prince To Come had transcended those things. Faraataa had no hope of achieving that. He knew that in his soul there dwelled nothing but hatred, hunger for vengeance, lust for destruction; to become the Prince To Come, he must empty himself to a husk, and that he could not do. But there were ways of approaching the desired state. He dreamed of a time when all that he had been working for was accomplished: the enemy destroyed, the forsaken lands reclaimed, the rites reestablished, the world born anew. He journeyed forth into that era and let its joy possess him. He forced from his soul all recollection of defeat, exile, loss. He saw the tabernacles of the dead city come alive. In the grip of such a vision, what need for vengeance? What enemy was there to hate and destroy? A strange and wondrous peace spread through his spirit. The day of rebirth had arrived; all was well in the world; his pain was gone forever, and he was at rest.

In that moment he took on the form of the Prince To Come.

Maintaining that form with a discipline that grew less effortful by the moment, he knelt and arranged the stones and feathers to make the altar. He captured two lizards and a night-crawling bruul and used them for the offering. He passed the Three Waters, spittle, urine, and tears. He gathered pebbles and laid them out in the shape of the Velalisier rampart. He uttered the Four Sorrows and the Five Griefs. He knelt and ate earth. A vision of the lost city entered his mind: the blue stone rampart, the dwelling of the king, the Place of Unchangingness, the Tables of the Gods, the six high temples, the seventh that was defiled, the Shrine of the Downfall, the Road of the Departure. Still maintaining, with an effort, the form of the Prince To Come, he told himself the tale of the downfall of Velalisier, experiencing that dark tragedy while feeling the grace and aura of the Prince upon him, so that he could comprehend the loss of the great capital not with pain but with actual love, seeing it as a necessary stage in the journey of his people, unavoidable, inevitable. When he knew he had come to accept the truth of that he allowed himself to shift form, reverting to the shapes of the Final King, the Flayed Man, the Blind Giant, the Red Woman, and then at last to that of Faraataa of Avendroyne.

It was done.

He lay sprawled face down on the soft mossy soil as the first rains of morning began to fall.

After a time he rose, gathered the stones and feathers of the little altar, and walked back toward the cottage. The peace of the Prince To Come still lay upon his soul, but he strived now to put that benign aura from him: the time had come to commence the work of the day. Such things as hatred, destruction, and vengeance might be alien to the spirit of the Prince To Come, but they were necessary tools in the task of bringing the kingdom of the Prince into being.

He waited outside the cottage until enough of the others had returned from their own obeisances to allow him to enter upon the calling of the water-kings. One by one, they took up their positions about him, Aarisiim with his hand to Faraataa’s right shoulder, Benuuiab to the left, Siimii touching his forehead, Miisiim his loins, and the rest arranged in concentric circles about those four, linked arm to arm.

“Now,” Faraataa said. And their minds joined and thrust outward.

—Brother in the sea!

The effort was so great that Faraataa felt his shape flowing and shifting of its own accord, like that of a child just learning how to bring the power into play. He sprouted feathers, talons, six terrible beaks; he became a bilantoon, a sigimoin, a snorting raging bidlak. Those about him gripped him all the more tightly, although the intensity of his signal held such force that some of them too fluttered as he did from form to form.

—Brother! Hear me! Help me!

And from the vastness of the depths came the image of huge dark wings slowly opening and closing over titanic bodies. And then a voice like a hundred bells tolling at once:

—I hear, little land-brother.

It was the water-king Maazmoorn who spoke. Faraataa knew them all by the music of their minds: Maazmoorn the bells, Girouz the singing thunder, Sheitoon the slow sad drums. There were dozens of the great kings, and the voice of each was unmistakable.

—Carry me, O King Maazmoorn!

—Come upon me, O land-brother.

Faraataa felt the pull, and yielded himself to it, and was lifted upward and out, leaving his body behind. In an instant he was at the sea, an instant more and he entered it; and then he and Maazmoorn were one. Ecstasy overwhelmed him: that joining, that communion, was so potent that it could easily be an end in itself, a delight that fulfilled all yearnings, if he would allow it. But he never would allow it.

The seat of the water-king’s towering intelligence was itself like an ocean—limitless, all-enfolding, infinitely deep. Faraataa, sinking down and down and down, lost himself in it. But never did he lose awareness of his task. Through the strength of the water-king he would achieve what he never could have done unaided. Gathering himself, he brought his powerful mind to its finest focus and from his place at the core of that warm cradling vastness he sent forth the messages he had come here to transmit:

—Saarekkin?

—I am here.

—What is the report?

—The lusavender is altogether destroyed throughout the eastern Rift. We have established the fungus beyond hope of eradication, and it is spreading on its own.

—What action is the government taking?

—The burning of infected crops. It will be futile.

—Victory is ours, Saarekkin!

—Victory is ours, Faraataa!

—Tii-haanimak?

—I hear you, Faraataa.

—What news?

—The poison traveled upon the rain, and the niyk-trees are destroyed in all Dulorn. It leaches now through the soil, and will ruin the glein and the stajja. We are preparing the next attack. Victory is ours, Faraataa!

—Victory is ours! Iniriis?

—I am Iniriis. The root-weevils thrive and spread in the fields of Zimroel. They will devour the ricca and the milaile.

—When will the effects be visible?

—They are visible now. Victory is ours, Faraataa!

—We have won Zimroel. The battle now must shift to Alhanroel, Iniriis. Begin shipping your weevils across the Inner Sea.

—It will be done.

—Victory is ours, Iniriis! Y-Uulisaan?

—This is Y-Uulisaan, Faraataa.

—You follow the Coronal still?

—I do. He has left Ebersinul and makes for Treymone.

—Does he know what is happening in Zimroel?

—He knows nothing. The grand processional absorbs his energies completely.

—Bring him the report, then. Tell him of weevils in the valley of the Zimr, of lusavender blight in the Rift, of the death of niyk and glein and stajja west of Dulorn.

—I, Faraataa?

—We must get even closer to him. The news must reach him sooner or later through legitimate channels. Let it come from us first, and let that be our way of approach to him. You will be his adviser on the diseases of plants, Y-Uulisaan. Tell him the news; and aid him in the struggle against these blights. We should know what counterattacks are planned. Victory is ours, Y-Uulisaan.

—Victory is ours, Faraataa!

14

The message was more than an hour old when it finally reached the high spokesman Hornkast in his private lair far uplevel, just outside the Sphere of Triple Shadows:

The high spokesman glared at the messengers. They knew he was never to be disturbed in this chamber except for a matter of the greatest urgency.

“What is it? Is he dying? Dead already?”

“We were not told, sir.”

“Did Sepulthrove seem unusually disturbed?”

“He seemed uneasy, sir, but I have no idea—”

“All right. Never mind. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Hastily Hornkast cleansed himself and dressed. If it has truly come, he thought sourly, it comes at a most inconvenient moment. Tyeveras has waited at least a dozen decades for his dying; could he not have held off another hour or two? If it has truly come.

The golden-haired woman who had been visiting him said, “Shall I stay here until you come back?”

He shook his head. “There’s no telling how long this will take. If the Pontifex has died—”

The woman made the Labyrinth sign. “The Divine forbid!”

“Indeed,” said Hornkast drily.

He went out. The Sphere of Triple Shadows, rising high above the gleaming obsidian walls of the plaza, was in its brightest phase, casting an eerie blue-white light that obliterated all sensations of dimensionality or depth: the passersby looked like mere paper dolls, floating on a gentle breeze. With the messengers beside him and hard pressed to keep up with his pace, Hornkast hastened across the plaza to the private lift, moving, as always, with a vigor that belied his eighty years.

The descent to the imperial zone was interminable.

Dead? Dying? Inconceivable. Hornkast realized that he had never taken into account the contingency of an unexpected natural death for Tyeveras. Sepulthrove had assured him that the machinery would not fail, that the Pontifex could be kept alive, if need be, another twenty or thirty years, perhaps as much as fifty. And the high spokesman had assumed that his death, when it came, would be the outcome of a carefully arrived at political decision, not something awkwardly happening without warning in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.

And if it had? Lord Valentine must be summoned at once from the westlands. Ah, how he would hate that, dragged into the Labyrinth before he had fairly begun his processional! I will have to resign, of course, Hornkast told himself.

Valentine will want his own high spokesman: that little scar-faced man Sleet, no doubt, or even the Vroon. Hornkast considered what it would be like to train one of them in the duties of the office he had held so long. Sleet full of contempt and condescension, or the wizardy little Vroon, those huge glittering eyes, that beak, those tentacles—

That would be his last responsibility, to instruct the new high spokesman. And then I will go away, he thought, and I suspect I will not long survive the loss of my office. Elidath, I suppose, will become Coronal. They say he is a good man, very dear to Lord Valentine, almost like a brother. How strange it will be, after all these years, to have a real Pontifex again, actively working with his Coronal! But I will not see it, Hornkast told himself. I will not be here.

In that mood of foreboding and resignation he arrived at the ornately embellished door to the imperial throne room. He slipped his hand into the recognition glove and squeezed the cool yielding sphere within; and at his touch the door slid back to reveal the great globe of the imperial chamber, the lofty throne upon the three broad steps, the elaborate mechanisms of the Pontifex’s life-support systems, and, within the bubble of pale blue glass that had held him for so many years, the long-limbed figure of the Pontifex himself, fleshless and parched like his own mummy, upright in his seat, jaws clenched, eyes bright, bright, bright still with inextinguishable life.

A familiar crew of grotesques stood beside the throne: ancient Dilifon, the withered and trembling private secretary; the Pontifical dream-speaker; the witch Narrameer; and Sepulthrove the physician, hawk-nosed, skin the color of dried mud. From then, even from Narrameer, who kept herself young and implausibly beautiful by her sorceries, came a pulsing aura of age, decay, death. Hornkast, who had seen these people every day for forty years, had never before perceived with such intensity how frightful they were: and, he knew, he must be just as frightful himself. Perhaps the time has come, he thought, to clear us all away.

“I came as soon as the messengers could reach me,” he said. He glanced toward the Pontifex. “Well? He’s dying, is he? He looks just the same to me.”

“He is very far from dying,” said Sepulthrove.

“Then what’s going on?”

“Listen,” the physician said. “He’s starting again.”

The creature in the life-support globe stirred and swayed from side to side in minute oscillations. A low whining sound came from the Pontifex, and then a kind of half-whistled snore, and a thick bubbling gurgle that went on and on.

Hornkast had heard all these sounds many times before. They were the private language the Pontifex in his terrible senility had invented, and which the high spokesman alone had mastered. Some were almost words, or the ghosts of words, and within their blurred outlines the original meanings were still apparent. Others had evolved from words over the years into mere noise, but Hornkast, because he had observed those evolutions in their various stages, knew what meanings were intended. Some were nothing but moans and sighs and weepings without a verbal content. And some seemed to have a certain complexity of form that might represent concepts that had been perceived by Tyeveras in his long mad sleepless isolation, and were known to him alone.

“I hear the usual,” said Hornkast.

“Wait.”

He listened. He heard the string of syllables that meant Lord Malibor—the Pontifex had forgotten Malibor’s two successors, and thought Malibor was Coronal still—and then a skein of other royal names, Prestimion, Confalume, Dekkeret. Malibor again. The word for sleep. The name of Ossier, who had been Pontifex before Tyeveras. The name of Kinniken, who had preceded Ossier.

“He rambles in the remote past, as he often does. For this you called me down here with such urgent—”

“Wait.”

In growing irritation Hornkast turned his attention again to the inchoate monolog of the Pontifex, and was stunned to hear, for the first time in many years, a perfectly enunciated, completely recognizable word:

“Life.”

“You heard?” Sepulthrove asked.

Hornkast nodded. “When did this start?”

“Two hours ago, two and a half.”

“Majesty.”

“We have made a record of all of this,” said Dilifon.

“What else has he said that you can understand?”

“Seven or eight words,” Sepulthrove replied. “Perhaps there are others that only you can recognize.”

Hornkast looked toward Narrameer. “Is he awake or dreaming?”

“I think it is wrong to use either of those terms in connection with the Pontifex,” she said. “He lives in both states at once.”

“Come. Rise. Walk.”

“He’s said those before, several times,” Dilifon murmured.

There was silence. The Pontifex seemed to have lapsed into sleep, though his eyes were still open. Hornkast stared grimly. When Tyeveras first had become ill, early in the reign of Lord Valentine, it had seemed only logical to sustain the old Pontifex’s life in this way, and Hornkast had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the scheme that Sepulthrove had proposed. It had never happened before that a Pontifex had outlived two Coronals, so that the third Coronal of the reign came into power when the Pontifex was already in extreme old age. That had distorted the dynamics of the imperial system. Hornkast himself had pointed out at that time that Lord Valentine, young and untried, barely in command of the duties of the Coronal, could not be sent on to the Labyrinth so soon. By general agreement it was essential that the Pontifex remain on his throne a few more years, if he could be kept alive. Sepulthrove had found the means to keep him alive, though quickly it was apparent that Tyeveras had lapsed into senility and dwelled in hopeless lunatic death-in-life.

But then had come the episode of the usurpation, and then the difficult years of restoration, when all the Coronal’s energies were needed to repair the chaos of the upheaval. Tyeveras had had to remain in his cage year after year. Though the continued life of the Pontifex meant Hornkast’s own continuance in power, and the power he had amassed by default of the Pontifex by now was extraordinary, nevertheless it was a repellent thing to watch, this cruel suspension of a life long since deserving of a termination. Yet Lord Valentine asked for time, and more time, and yet more time still, to finish his work as Coronal. Eight years, now: was that not time enough? With surprise Hornkast found himself almost ready now to pray for Tyeveras’s deliverance from this captivity. If only it were possible to let him sleep!

“Va—Va— ”

“What’s that?” Sepulthrove asked.

“Something new!” whispered Dilifon.

Hornkast gestured to them to be quiet.

“Va—Valentine —”

“This is new indeed!” said Narrameer.

“Valentine Pontifex—Valentine Pontifex of Majipoor—”

Followed by silence. Those words, plainly enunciated, free of all ambiguities, hovered in the air like exploding suns.

“I thought he had forgotten Valentine’s name,” Hornkast said. “He thinks Lord Malibor is Coronal.”

“Evidently he does not,” said Dilifon.

“Sometimes toward the end,” Sepulthrove said quietly, “the mind repairs itself. I think his sanity is returning.”

“He is as mad as ever!” cried Dilifon. “The Divine forbid that he should regain his understanding, and know what we have done to him!”

“I think,” said Hornkast, “that he has always known what we have done to him, and that he is regaining not his understanding but his ability to communicate with us in words. You heard him: Valentine Pontifex. He is hailing his successor, and he knows who his successor ought to be. Sepulthrove, is he dying?”

“The instruments indicate no physical change in him. I think he could continue this way for some long while.”

“We must not allow it,” said Dilifon.

“What are you suggesting?” Hornkast asked.

“That this has gone on long enough. I know what it is to be old, Hornkast—and perhaps you do also, though you show little outer sign of it. This man is half again as old as any of us. He suffers things we can scarcely imagine. I say make an end. Now. This very day.”

“We have no right,” said Hornkast. “I tell you, I feel for his sufferings even as you. But it is not our decision.”

“Make an end, nevertheless.”

“Lord Valentine must take responsibility for that.”

“Lord Valentine never will,” Dilifon muttered. “He’ll keep this farce running for fifty more years!”

“It is his choice,” said Hornkast firmly.

“Are we his servants, or the servants of the Pontifex?” asked Dilifon.

“It is one government, with two monarchs, and only one of them now is competent. We serve the Pontifex by serving the Coronal. And—”

From the life-support cage came a bellow of rage, and then an eerie indrawn whistling sound, and then three harsh growls. And then the words, even more clearly than before:

“Valentine—Pontifex of Majipoor—hail!”

“He hears what we say, and it angers him. He begs for death,” said Dilifon.

“Or perhaps he thinks he has already reached it,” Narrameer suggested.

“No. No. Dilifon is right,” said Hornkast. “He’s overheard us. He knows we won’t give him what he wants.”

“Come. Rise. Walk” Howlings. Babblings. “Death! Death! Death!”

In a despair deeper than anything he had felt in decades, the high spokesman rushed toward the life-support globe, half intending to rip the cables and tubes from their mountings and bring an end to this now. But of course that would be insanity. Hornkast halted; he peered in; his eyes met those of Tyeveras, and he compelled himself not to flinch as that great sadness poured out upon him. The Pontifex was sane again. That was unarguable. The Pontifex understood that death was being withheld from him for reasons of state.

“Your majesty?” Hornkast asked, speaking in his richest, fullest tone. “Your majesty, do you hear me? Close one eye if you hear me.”

There was no response.

“I think, nevertheless, that you hear me, majesty. And I tell you this: we know what you suffer. We will not allow you much longer to endure it. That we pledge to you, majesty.”

Silence. Stillness. Then:

“Life! Pain! Death!”

And then a moaning and a babbling and a whistling and a shrieking that was like a song from beyond the grave.

15

“—and that is the temple of the Lady,” said Lord Mayor Sambigel, pointing far up the face of the astonishing vertical cliff that rose just east of his city. “The holiest of her shrines in the world, saving only the Isle itself, of course.”

Valentine stared. The temple gleamed like a solitary white eye set in the dark forehead of the cliff.

It was the fourth month of the grand processional now, or the fifth, or perhaps the sixth: days and weeks, cities and provinces, everything had begun to blur and merge. This day he had arrived at the great port of Alaisor, far up the northwestern coast of Alhanroel. Behind him lay Treymone, Stoienzar, Vilimong, Estotilaup, Kimoise: city upon city, all flowing together in his mind into one vast metropolis that spread like some sluggish many-armed monster across the face of Majipoor.

Sambigel, a short swarthy man with a fringe of dense black beard around the edge of his face, droned on and on, bidding the Coronal welcome with his most sonorous platitudes. Valentine’s eyes felt glazed; his mind wandered. He had heard all this before, in Kikil, in Steenorp, in Klai: never-to-be-forgotten occasion, love and gratitude of all the people, proud of this, honored by that. Yes. Yes. He found himself wondering which city it was that had shown him its famous vanishing lake. Was it Simbilfant? And the aerial ballet, that was Montepulsiane, or had it been Ghrav? The golden bees were surely Beilemoona, but the sky-chain? Arkilon? Sennamole?

Once more he looked toward the temple on the cliff. It beckoned powerfully to him. He yearned to be there at this very moment: to be caught on the fingertip of a gale; and swept like a dry leaf to that lofty summit.

—Mother, let me rest with you awhile!

There came a pause in the lord mayor’s speech, or perhaps he was done. Valentine turned to Tunigorn and said, “Make arrangements for me to sleep at that temple tonight.”

Sambigel seemed nonplussed. “It was my understanding, my lord, that you were to see the Tomb of Lord Stiamot this afternoon, and then to go to the Hall of Topaz for a reception, followed by a dinner at—”

“Lord Stiamot has waited eight thousand years for me to pay homage to him. He can wait one day more.”

“Of course, my lord. So be it, my lord.” Sambigel made a hasty flurry of starbursts. “I will notify the hierarch Ambargarde that you will be her guest tonight. And now, if you will permit, my lord, we have an entertainment to offer you—”

An orchestra struck up some jubilant anthem. From hundreds of thousands of throats came what he did not doubt were stirring verses, though he could not make out a syllable of them. He stood impassively, gazing out over that vast throng, nodding occasionally, smiling, making contact now and then with the eyes of some awed citizen who would never forget this day. A sense of his own unreality came over him. He did not need to be a living man, he thought, to be playing this part. A statue would do just as well, some cunning marionette, or even one of those waxworks things that he had once seen in Pidruid on a festival night long ago. How useful it would be to send an imitation Coronal of some such sort out to these events, capable of listening gravely and smiling appreciatively and waving heartily and perhaps even of delivering a few heartfelt words of gratitude—

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Carabella watching him worriedly. He made a little gesture with two fingers of his right hand, a private sign they had between them, to tell her he was all right. But the troubled look did not leave her face. And it seemed to him that Tunigorn and Lisamon Hultin had edged forward until they stood oddly close to him. To catch him if he fell? Confalume’s whiskers, did they think he was going to collapse the way he had in the Labyrinth?

He held himself all the more erect: wave, smile, nod, wave, smile, nod. Nothing was going to go wrong. Nothing. Nothing. But would this ceremony ever end?

There was half an hour more. But at last it was over, and the royal party, leaving by way of an underground passage, quickly made its way toward the quarters set aside for the Coronal in the lord mayor’s palace on the far side of the square. When they were alone Carabella said, “It seemed to me you were growing ill up there, Valentine.”

He said as lightly as he could, “If boredom is a malady, then I was growing ill, yes.”

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “Is it absolutely essential to continue with this processional?”

“You know I have no choice.”

“I fear for you.”

“Why, Carabella?”

“There are times I scarcely know you any longer. Who is this brooding fretful person who shares my bed? What has become of the man called Valentine I knew once in Pidruid”

“He is still here.”

“So I would believe. But hidden, as the sun is hidden when the shadow of a moon falls upon it. What shadow is on you, Valentine? What shadow is on the world? Something strange befell you in the Labyrinth. What was it? Why?”

“The Labyrinth is a place of no joy for me, Carabella. Perhaps I felt enclosed there, buried, smothered—” He shook his head. “It was strange, yes. But the Labyrinth is far behind me. Once we began to travel in happier lands I felt my old self returning, I knew joy again, love, I—”

“You deceive yourself, perhaps, but not me. There’s no joy in it for you, not now. At the beginning you drank in everything as if you couldn’t possibly get enough of it—you wanted to go everywhere, behold everything, taste all that is to be tasted—but not anymore. I see it in your eyes, I see it on your face. You move about like a sleepwalker. Do you deny it?”

“I do grow weary, yes. I admit that.”

“Then abandon the processional! Return to the Mount, which you love, where you always have been truly happy!”

“I am the Coronal. The Coronal has a sacred duty to present himself to the people he governs. I owe them that.”

“And what do you owe to yourself, then?”

He shrugged. “I beg you, sweet lady! Even if I grow bored, and I do—I won’t deny it, I hear speeches in my sleep now, I see endless parades of jugglers and acrobats—nevertheless, no one has ever died of boredom. The processional is my obligation. I must continue.”

“At least cancel the Zimroel part of it, then. One continent is more than enough. It’ll take you months simply to return to Castle Mount from here, if you stop at every major city along the way. And then Zimroel? Piliplok, Ni-moya, Til-omon, Narabal, Pidruid—it’ll take years, Valentine!”

He shook his head slowly. “I have an obligation to all the people, not only the ones who live in Alhanroel, Carabella.”

Taking his hand, she said, “That much I understand. But you may be demanding too much of yourself. I ask you again: consider eliminating Zimroel from the tour. Will you do that? Will you at least give it some thought?”

“I’d return to Castle Mount this very evening, if I could. But I must go on. I must.”

“Tonight at the temple you hope to speak in dreams with your mother the Lady, is that not so?”

“Yes,” he said. “But—”

“Promise me this, then. If you reach her mind with yours, ask her if you should go to Zimroel. Let her advice guide you in this, as it has so well in so many other things. Will you?”

“Carabella—”

“Will you ask her? Only ask!”

“Very well,” he said. “I will ask. That much do I promise.”

She looked at him mischievously. “Do I seem a shrewish wife, Valentine? Chivvying and pressing you this way? I do this out of love, you know.”

“That I know,” said he, and drew her close and held her.

They said no more, for it was time then to make ready for the journey up Alaisor Heights to the temple of the Lady. Twilight was descending as they set out up the narrow winding road, and the lights of Alaisor sparkled behind them like millions of bright gems scattered carelessly over the plain.

The hierarch Ambargarde, a tall, regal-looking woman with keen eyes and lustrous white hair, waited at the gateway of the temple to receive the Coronal. While awed acolytes looked on gaping, she offered him a brief and warm welcome—he was, she said, the first Coronal to visit the temple since Lord Tyeveras had come, on his second processional—and led him through the lovely grounds until the temple itself came into view: a long building a single story in height, built of white stone, unornamented, even stark, situated in a spacious and open garden of great simplicity and beauty. Its western face curved in a crescent arc along the edge of the cliff, looking outward to the sea; and, on its inner side, wings set apart from one another at narrow angles radiated toward the east.

Valentine passed through an airy loggia to a small portico beyond that seemed to be suspended in space on the cliff’s outermost rim. There he stood a long while in silence, with Carabella and the hierarch beside him, and Sleet and Tunigorn close by. It was wondrously quiet here: he heard nothing but the rush of the cool clear wind that blew without pause from the northwest, and the faint fluttering of Carabella’s scarlet cloak. He looked down toward Alaisor. The great seaport lay like a giant outspread fan at the base of the cliff, ranging so far to the north and south that he could not see its limits. The dark spokes of colossal avenues ran its entire length, converging on a distant, barely visible circle of grand boulevards where six giant obelisks rose skyward: the tomb of Lord Stiamot, conqueror of the Metamorphs. Beyond lay only the sea, dark green, shrouded in the low-lying haze.

“Come, my lord,” said Ambargarde. “The last light of the day is going. May I show you to your chamber?”

He would sleep alone that night, in an austere little room close by the tabernacle. Nor would he eat, or drink anything except the wine of the dream-speakers that would open his mind and make it accessible to the Lady. When Ambargarde had gone, he turned to Carabella and said, “I have not forgotten my promise, love.”

“That I know. Oh, Valentine, I pray she tells you to turn back to the Mount!”

“Will you abide by it if she does not?”

“How can I not abide by whatever you decide? You are the Coronal. But I pray she tells you turn back. Dream well, Valentine.”

“Dream well, Carabella.”

She left him. He stood for some time at the window, watching as night engulfed the shoreline and the sea. Somewhere due west of here, he knew, lay the Isle of Sleep that was his mother’s domain, far below the horizon, the home of that sweet and blessed Lady who brought wisdom to the world as it dreamed. Valentine stared intently seaward, searching in the mists and the gathering darkness as if he could see, if only he peered hard enough, the brilliant white ramparts of chalk on which the Isle rested.

Then he undressed and lay down on the simple cot that was the room’s only furniture, and lifted the goblet that held the dark red dream-wine. He took a deep draft of the sweet thick stuff, and then another, and lay back and put himself into the trance state that opened his mind to impulses from afar, and waited for sleep.

—Come to me, mother. This is Valentine.

Drowsiness came over him, and he slipped downward into slumber.

—Mother —

—Lady—

—Mother—

Phantoms danced through his brain. Tenuous elongated figures burst like bubbles from vents in the ground, and spiraled upward to the roof of the sky. Disembodied hands sprouted from the trunks of trees, and boulders opened yellow eyes, and rivers grew hair. He watched and waited, letting himself glide downward and yet deeper downward into the realm of dreams, and all the while sending forth his soul to the Lady.

Then he had a glimpse of her seated by the eight-sided pool in her chamber of fine white stone at Inner Temple on the Isle. She was bending forward, as though studying her reflection. He floated toward her and hovered just behind her, and looked down and saw the familiar face glimmering in the pool, the dark shining hair, the full lips and warm loving eyes, the flower as always behind one ear, the silver band about her forehead. He said softly, “Mother? It’s Valentine.”

She turned to face him. But the face he saw was the face of a stranger: a pale, haggard, frowning, puzzled face.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Why, you know me! I am the Lady of the Isle!”

“Most certainly I am.”

“No.”

“Why have you come to me here? You should not have done that, for you are Pontifex, and it is more fitting for me to journey toward you than you toward me.”

“Pontifex? Coronal, you mean.”

“Ah, did I say that? Then I was mistaken.”

“And my mother? Where is she?”

“I am she, Valentine.”

And indeed the haggard pale face was but a mask, which grew thin and peeled away like a sheath of old skin, to reveal his mother’s wondrous smile, his mother’s comforting eyes. And that in turn peeled away to show the other face once more, and then the true Lady’s beneath that, but this time she was weeping. He reached for her and his hands passed through her, and he found himself alone. She did not return to him that night, though he pursued her through vision after vision, into realms of such strangeness that he would gladly have retreated if he could; and at last he abandoned the quest and gave himself over to the deepest and most dreamless of sleeps.

When he awakened it was midmorning. He bathed and stepped from his chamber and found Carabella outside, face drawn and tense, eyes reddened as though she had not slept at all.

“How is my lord?” she asked at once.

“I learned nothing last night. My dreams were hollow, and the Lady did not speak with me.”

“Oh, love, how sorry I am!”

“I’ll attempt it again tonight. Perhaps I had too little dream-wine, or too much. The hierarch will advise me. Have you eaten, Carabella?”

“Long since. But I’ll breakfast again with you now, if you wish. And Sleet wants to see you. Some urgent message arrived in the night, and he would have gone right in to you, but I forbade it.”

“What message is that?”

“He said nothing to me. Shall I send for him now?”

Valentine nodded. “I’ll wait out there,” he said, indicating with a wave of his arm the little portico overlooking the outer face of the cliff.

Sleet had a stranger with him when he appeared: a slender smooth-skinned man with a wide-browed triangular face and large somber eyes, who made a quick starburst gesture and stood staring at Valentine as though the Coronal were a creature from some other world. “Lordship, this is Y-Uulisaan, who came last night from Zimroel.”

“An unusual name,” Valentine said.

“It has been in our family many generations, my lord. I am associated with the office of agricultural affairs in Ni-moya, and it is my mission to carry unhappy tidings to you from Zimroel.”

Valentine felt a tightening in his chest.

Y-Uulisaan held forth a sheaf of folders. “It is all described in here—the full details of each of the plagues, the area it affects, the extent of the damage—”

“Plagues? What plagues?”

“In the agricultural zones, my lord. In Dulorn the lusavender smut has reappeared, and also there has been a dying of niyk trees to the west of the Rift, and also the stajja and glein are affected, and root weevils have attacked the ricca and milaile in—”

“My lord!” Carabella cried suddenly. “Look, look there!”

He whirled to face her. She was pointing skyward.

“What are those?”

Startled, Valentine looked up. On the bosom of the brisk breeze there journeyed a strange army of large glossy transparent floating creatures, unlike anything he had ever seen, appearing suddenly out of the west. They had bodies perhaps a man’s length in diameter, shaped like shining cups upcurved to give them buoyancy, and long hairy legs that they held straight out on all sides. Their eyes, running in double rows across their heads, were like black beads the size of a man’s fists, shining dazzlingly in the sunlight. Hundreds, even thousands, of the spiders were passing overhead, a migratory procession, a river of weird wraiths in the sky.

Carabella said, shuddering, “What monstrous-looking things! Like something out of the worst sending of the King of Dreams.”

Valentine watched in astonishment and horror as they drifted past, dipping and soaring on the wind. Shouts of alarm now came from the courtyard of the temple. Valentine, beckoning Sleet to follow him, ran inward, and saw the old hierarch standing in the center of the lawn, waving an energy-thrower about. The air was thick with the floating things, some of which were drifting toward the ground, and she and half a dozen acolytes were attempting to destroy them before they landed, but several score had already reached ground. Wherever they touched down they remained motionless; but the rich green lawn was instantly burned yellow over an area perhaps twice the creatures’ size.

Within minutes the onslaught was over. The floating things had passed by and were disappearing to the east, but the grounds and garden of the temple looked as if they had been attacked with blowtorches. The hierarch Ambargarde, seeing Valentine, put down her energy-thrower and walked slowly toward him.

“What were those things?” he asked.

“Wind-spiders, my lord.”

“I’ve not heard of them. Are they native to this region?”

“The Divine be thanked, my lord, they are not! They come from Zimroel, from the mountains beyond Khyntor. Every year, when it is their mating season, they cast themselves into the stream of the high winds, and while they are aloft they couple, and let loose their fertile eggs, which are blown eastward by the contrary lower winds of the mountains until they land in the hatching-places. But the adults are caught by the currents of the air and carried out to sea, and sometimes they are swept all the way to the coast of Alhanroel.”

Sleet, with a grimace of disgust, walked toward one last wind-spider that had fallen nearby. It lay quietly, making only the faintest movements, feeble twitchings of its thick shaggy legs.

“Keep back from it!” called Ambargarde. “Every part of it is poisonous!” She summoned an acolyte, who destroyed it with a burst from her energy-thrower. To Valentine the hierarch said, “Before they mate they are harmless enough things, eaters of leaves and soft twigs, and such. But once they have let loose their eggs they change, and become dangerous. You see what they have done to the grass. We will have to dig that all out, or nothing will ever grow there again.”

“And this happens every year?” Valentine asked.

“Oh, no, no, thanks be to the Divine! Most of them perish out at sea. Only once in many years do they get this far. But when they do—ah, my lord, it is always a year of evil omen!”

“When did they last come?” the Coronal asked.

Ambargarde seemed to hesitate. At length she said, “In the year of the death of your brother Lord Voriax, my lord.”

“And before that?”

Her lips trembled. “I cannot remember. Perhaps ten years before, perhaps fifteen.”

“Not in the year of the death of Lord Malibor, by any chance?”

“My lord—forgive me—”

“There is nothing that needs forgiveness,” Valentine said quietly. He walked away from the group and stood staring at the burned places in the devastated lawn. In the Labyrinth, he thought, the Coronal is smitten with dark visions at the feasting table. In Zimroel there are plagues upon the crops. In Alhanroel the wind-spiders come, bearing evil omens. And when I call upon my mother in my dreams I see a stranger’s face. The message is very clear, is it not? Yes. The message is very clear.

“Sleet!” he called.

“Lordship?”

“Find Asenhart, and have him make ready the fleet. We sail as soon as possible.”

“For Zimroel, my lord?”

“For the Isle, first, so I may confer with the Lady. And then to Zimroel, yes.”

“Valentine?” a small voice said.

It was Carabella. Her eyes were fixed and strange and her face was pale. She looked almost like a child now—a small frightened child whose soul has been brushed in the night by the King of Dreams.

“What evil is loose in our land, my lord?” she asked in a voice he could scarcely hear. “What will happen to us, my lord? Tell me: what will happen to us?”