Valentine Pontifex

1

“Your task is to reach Ertsud Grand,” the instructor had said. “Your route is the open country south of the Pinitor Highway. Your weapons are cudgel and dagger. Your obstacles are seven tracker beasts: vourhain, malorn, zeil, kassai, min-mollitor, weyhant, and zytoon. They are dangerous and will injure you if you allow them to take you by surprise.”

Hissune concealed himself behind a thick-trunked ghazan tree so gnarled and twisted that it could well have been ten thousand years old, and peered cautiously down the long narrow valley ahead of him. All was still. He saw none of his fellow trainees, nor any of the tracker beasts.

This was his third day on the trail and he still had twelve miles to go. But what lay immediately before him was dismaying, a bleak slope of loose broken granite that probably would begin to slide the moment he stepped out onto it, sending him crashing onto the rocks of the distant valley floor. Even if this was only a training exercise, he knew that he could get quite authentically killed out here if he blundered.

But going back the way he had come and trying some other route of descent was even less appealing. Once more to risk that narrow ledge of a trail winding in miserable switchbacks over the face of the cliff, the thousand-foot drop that a single false step would bring, those ghastly overhangs that had forced him to crawl forward with his nose to the ground and barely half a foot’s clearance above the back of his head—no. Better to trust himself to that field of rubble in front of him than to try to turn back. Besides, there was that creature prowling still up there, the vourhain, one of the seven trackers. Having come past those sickle tusks and great curving claws once, he had no appetite for confronting them a second time.

Using his cudgel as a walking-stick, he edged warily out onto the gravel field.

The sun was bright and penetrating, this far down Castle Mount, well below the perpetual band of clouds that sheathed the great mountain in its upper middle reaches. Its brilliant light struck fragments of mica embedded in the shattered sharp-edged granite of the slope and rebounded into his eyes, dazzling him.

He put one foot carefully forward, leaned into his step, found the rubble firm beneath his weight. He took another step. Another. A few small chunks of rock came loose and went skittering down the slope, flashing like little mirrors as they turned over and over in their fall.

There seemed no danger yet that the entire slope would give way. He continued downward. His ankles and knees, sore from yesterday’s difficult crossing of a high windswept pass, protested the steep downhill angle. The straps of his backpack sliced into him. He was thirsty and his head ached slightly: the air was thin in this stretch of Castle Mount. There were moments when he found himself wishing he was safely back at the Castle, poring over the texts on constitutional law and ancient history that he had been condemned to study for the past six months. He had to smile at that, remembering how in the weariest days of his tutoring he had been desperately counting the days until he was released from his books and could move on to the excitement of the survival test. Just now, though, his days in the library of the Castle did not seem nearly so burdensome, nor this journey anything but a grueling ordeal.

He looked up. The sun seemed to fill half the sky. He raised his hand before his eyes as a shield.

It was almost a year, now, since Hissune had left the Labyrinth, and he still was not wholly used to the sight of that fiery thing in the sky, or to the touch of its rays on his skin. There were times when he reveled in its unfamiliar warmth—he had long since exchanged the Labyrinth pallor for a deep golden tan—and yet at other times it kindled fear in him, and he wanted to turn from it and bury himself a thousand feet below the surface of the earth, where it could not reach him.

Idiot. Simpleton. The sun’s not your enemy! Keep moving. Keep moving.

On the distant horizon he saw the black towers of Ertsud Grand to the west. That pool of gray shadow off to the other way was the city of Hoikmar, from which he had set forth. By his best calculation he had come twenty miles—through heat and thirst, across lakes of dust and ancient seas of ash, down spiraling fumaroles and over fields of clinking metallic lava. He had eluded the kassai, that thing of twitching antennae and eyes like white platters which had stalked him half a day. He had fooled the vourhain with the old trick of the double scent, letting the animal go chasing off after his discarded tunic while he went down a trail too narrow for the beast to follow. Five trackers left. Malorn, zeil, weyhant, min-mollitor, zytoon.

Strange names. Strange beasts, native to nowhere. Perhaps they were synthetics, created as mounts had been by the forgotten witchcraft-sciences of the old days. But why create monsters? Why set them loose on Castle Mount? Simply for the testing and annealing of the young nobility? Hissune wondered what would happen if the weyhant or the zytoon rose suddenly out of all this rocky rubble and sprang upon him unawares. They will injure you if you allow them to take you by surprise. Injure, yes. But kill? What was the purpose of this test? To hone the survival skills of young Knight-Initiates, or to eliminate the unfit? At this time, Hissune knew, some three dozen initiates like himself were scattered along the thirty miles of the testing grounds. How many would live to reach Ertsud Grand?

He would, at least. Of that he was certain.

Slowly, poking with his cudgel to test the stability of the rocks, he made his way down the granite chute. Halfway down came the first mishap: a huge, secure-looking triangular slab turned out to be only precariously balanced, and gave way to the first light touch of his left foot. For an instant he wavered in a wild lurching way, desperately trying to steady himself, and then he plunged forward. The cudgel flew from his hands and as he stumbled, dislodging a small avalanche of rocks, his right leg slipped thigh-deep between two great slabs keen as knifeblades.

He grabbed whatever he could and held on. But the rocks below him did not begin to slide. Fiery sensations were running the length of his leg. Broken? Torn ligaments, strained muscles? He began slowly to pull it free. His legging was slit from thigh to calf, and blood was flowing freely from a deep cut. But that seemed to be the worst of it, that and a throbbing in his groin that would probably cause him some bothersome lameness tomorrow. Recovering his cudgel, he went cautiously onward.

Then the character of the slope changed: the big cracked slabs gave way to a fine gravel, even more treacherous underfoot. Hissune adopted a slow sliding gait, turning his feet sideways and pushing the surface of the gravel ahead of him as he descended. It was hard on his sore leg but afforded some degree of control. The bottom of the slope was coming into view now.

He slipped twice on the gravel. The first time he skidded only a few feet; the second carried him a dozen yards downslope, and he saved himself from tumbling all the way only by jamming his feet against the gravel and burrowing under for six or seven inches while hanging on fiercely with his hands.

When he picked himself up he could not find his dagger. He searched some while in the gravel, with no success, and finally he shrugged and went on. The dagger would be of no use against a weyhant or a min-mollitor anyway, he told himself. But he would miss it in small ways when he foraged for his food along the trail: digging for edible tubers, peeling the skins from fruits.

At the bottom of the slope the valley opened into a broad rocky plateau, dry, forbidding, dotted here and there by ancient-looking ghazan trees, all but leafless, bent in the usual grotesque convoluted shapes. But he saw, a short way off toward the east, trees of another sort, slender and tall and leafy, clumped close together. They were a good indication of water, and he headed for them.

But that clump of greenery proved to be farther away than he thought. An hour of plodding toward it did not seem to bring it much closer. Hissune’s injured leg was stiffening rapidly. His canteen was all but empty. And when he came across the crest of a low ridge he found the malorn waiting for him on the other side.

It was a strikingly hideous creature: a baggy oval body set within ten enormously long legs that made a huge V-bend to hold its thorax three feet off the ground. Eight of the legs ended in broad flat walking-pads. The two front ones were equipped with pincers and claws. A row of gleaming red eyes ran completely around the rim of its body. A long curved tail bristled with stingers.

“I could kill you with a mirror!” Hissune told it. “Just let you see your reflection and you’d ugly yourself to death!”

The malorn made a soft hissing sound and began to move slowly toward him, jaws working, pincers twitching. Hissune hefted his cudgel and waited. There was nothing to fear, he told himself, if he kept calm: the idea of this test was not to kill the trainees but only to toughen them, and perhaps to observe their behavior under stress.

He let the malorn get within ten yards. Then he picked up a rock and flipped it toward the creature’s face. The malorn batted it aside easily and kept advancing. Gingerly Hissune edged around to the left, into a saddle of the ridge, keeping to the high ground and gripping his cudgel with both hands. The malorn looked neither agile nor swift, but if it tried to charge him Hissune intended that it would have to run uphill.

“Hissune?”

The voice came from behind him. “Who is it?” Hissune called, without looking around.

“Alsimir.” A knight-initiate from Peritole, a year or two older than he was.

“Are you all right?” Hissune asked.

“I’m hurt. Malorn stung me.”

“Hurt bad?”

“My arm’s puffing up. Venomous.”

“I’ll be there right away. But first—”

“Watch out. It jumps.”

And indeed the malorn seemed to be flexing its legs for a leap. Hissune waited, balancing on the balls of his feet, rocking lightly. For an infinitely long moment nothing happened. Time itself seemed frozen: and Hissune stared patiently at the malorn. He was perfectly calm. He left no room in his mind for fear, for uncertainty, for speculation on what might happen next.

Then the strange stasis broke and suddenly the creature was aloft, kicking itself into the air with a great thrust of all its legs; and in the same moment Hissune rushed forward, scrambling down the ridge toward the soaring malorn, so that the beast in its mighty leap would overshoot him.

As the malorn coursed through the air just above Hissune’s head he threw himself to the ground to avoid the stabbing swipes of the deadly tail. Holding the cudgel in both his hands, he jabbed fiercely upward, ramming it as hard as he could into the creature’s underbelly. There was a whooshing sound of expelled air and the malorn’s legs flailed in anguish in all directions. Its claws came close to grazing Hissune as it fell.

The malorn landed on its back a few feet away. Hissune went to it and danced forward between the thrashing legs to bring the cudgel down into the malorn’s belly twice more. Then he stepped back. The malorn was still moving feebly. Hissune found the biggest boulder he could lift, held it high above the malorn, let it fall. The thrashing legs grew still. Hissune turned away, trembling now, sweating, and leaned on his cudgel. His stomach churned wildly and heaved; and then, after a moment, he was calm again.

Alsimir lay some fifty feet up the ridge, with his right hand clasped to his left shoulder, which seemed swollen to twice its normal size. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy.

Hissune knelt beside him. “Give me your dagger. I’ve lost mine.”

“It’s over there.”

Swiftly Hissune cut away Alsimir’s sleeve, revealing a star-shaped wound just above the biceps. With the tip of the dagger he cut a cross over the star, squeezed, drew blood, sucked it, spat, squeezed again. Alsimir trembled, whimpered, cried out once or twice. After a time Hissune wiped the wound clean and rummaged in his pack for a bandage.

“That might do it,” he said. “With luck you’ll be in Ertsud Grand by this time tomorrow and you can get proper treatment.”

Alsimir stared in horror at the fallen malorn. “I was trying to edge around it, same as you—and suddenly it jumped at me and bit me. I think it was waiting for me to die before it ate me—but then you came along.”

Hissune shivered. “Ugly beast. It didn’t look half so repulsive in the training manual pictures.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Probably. I wonder if we’re supposed to kill the trackers. Maybe they need them for next year’s tests.”

“That’s their problem,” said Alsimir. “If they’re going to send us out here to face those things, they shouldn’t be annoyed if we kill one occasionally. Ah, by the Lady, this hurts!”

“Come. We’ll finish the trek together.”

“We aren’t supposed to do that, Hissune.”

“What of it? You think I’m going to leave you alone like this? Come on. Let them flunk us, if they like. I kill their malorn, I rescue a wounded man—all right, so I fail the test. But I’ll be alive tomorrow. And so will you.”

Hissune helped Alsimir to his feet and they moved slowly toward the distant green trees. He found himself trembling again, suddenly, in a delayed reaction. That ghastly creature floating over his head, the ring of red staring eyes, the clacking jaws, the soft exposed underbelly—it would be a long time before he forgot any of that.

As they walked onward, a measure of calmness returned.

He tried to imagine Lord Valentine contending with malorns and zeils and zytoons in this forlorn valley, or Elidath, or Divvis, or Mirigant. Surely they all had had to go through the same testing in their knight-initiate days, and perhaps it was this same malorn that had hissed and clacked its jaws at the young Valentine twenty years ago. It all felt faintly absurd to Hissune: what did escaping from monsters have to do with learning the arts of government? No doubt he would see the connection sooner or later, he thought. Meanwhile he had Alsimir to worry about, and also the zeil, the weyhant, the min-mollitor, the zytoon. With any luck he’d only have to contend with one or two more of the trackers: it went against probability that he’d run into all seven during the trek. But it was still a dozen miles to Ertsud Grand, and the road ahead looked barren and harsh. So this was the jolly life on Castle Mount? Eight hours a day studying the decrees of every Coronal and Pontifex from Dvorn to Tyeveras, interrupted by little trips out into the scrub country to contend with malorns and zytoons? What about the feasting and the gaming? What about the merry jaunts through the parklands and forest preserves? He was beginning to think that people of the lowlands held an unduly romantic view of life among the highborn of the Mount.

Hissune glanced toward Alsimir. “How are you doing?”

“I feel pretty weak. But the swelling seems to be going down some.”

“We’ll wash the wound out when we reach those trees. There’s bound to be water there.”

“I’d have died if you hadn’t come along just then, Hissune.”

Hissune shrugged. “If I hadn’t come, someone else would. It’s the logical path across that valley.”

After a moment Alsimir said, “I don’t understand why they’re making you take this training.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sending you out to face all these risks.”

“Why not? All initiates have to do it.”

“Lord Valentine has special plans for you. That’s what I heard Divvis saying to Stasilaine last week.”

“I’m destined for great things, yes. Master of the stables. Keeper of the hounds.”

“I’m serious. Divvis is jealous of you, you know. And afraid of you, because you’re the Coronal’s favorite. Divvis wants to be Coronal—everybody knows that. And he thinks you’re getting in the way.”

“I think the venom is making you delirious.”

“Believe me. Divvis sees you as a threat, Hissune.”

“He shouldn’t. I’m no more likely to become Coronal than—than Divvis is. Elidath’s the heir presumptive. And Lord Valentine, I happen to know, is going to stay Coronal himself as long as he possibly can.”

“I tell you—”

“Don’t tell me anything. Just conserve your energy for the march. It’s a dozen miles to Ertsud Grand. And four more tracker beasts waiting for us along the way.”

2

This is the dream of the Piurivar Faraataa:

It is the Hour of the Scorpion and soon the sun will rise over Velalisier. Outside the gate of the city, along the road that was known as the Road of the Departure but will be known from this day forward as the Road of the Return, an immense procession is assembled, stretching far toward the horizon. The Prince To Come, wrapped in an emerald aura, stands at the head of the line. Behind him are four who wear the guise of the Red Woman, the Blind Giant, the Flayed Man, and the Final King. Then come the four prisoners, bound with loose withes; and then come the multitudes of the Piurivar folk: Those Who Return.

Faraataa floats high above the city, drifting easily, moving at will over all its vastness, taking in the immensity of it at a glance. It is perfect: everything has been made new, the rampart restored, the shrines set up once more, the fallen columns replaced. The aqueduct carries water again, and the gardens thrive, and the weeds and shrubs that had invaded every crevice have been hacked down, and the sand drifts swept away.

Only the Seventh Temple has been left as it was at the time of the Downfall: a flat stump, a mere foundation, surrounded by rubble. Faraataa hovers above it, and in the eye of his mind he journeys backward through the dark ocean of time, so that he sees the Seventh Temple as it had been before its destruction, and he is granted a vision of the Defilement.

Ah! There, see! Upon the Tables of the Gods the unholy sacrifice is being readied. On each of the Tables lies a great water-king, still living, helpless under its own weight, wings moving feebly, neck arched, eyes glowering with rage or fear. Tiny figures move about the two huge beings, preparing to enact the forbidden rites. Faraataa shivers. Faraataa weeps, and his tears fall like crystal globes to the distant ground. He sees the long knives flashing; he hears the water-kings roaring and snorting; he sees the flesh peeled away. He wants to cry out to the people, No, no, this is monstrous, we will be punished terribly, but what good, what good? All this has happened thousands of years ago. And so he floats, and so he watches. Like ants they stream across the city, the sinful ones, each with his fragment of the water-king held on high, and they carry the sacrifice meat to the Seventh Temple, they hurl it on the pyre, they sing the Song of the Burning. What are you doing? Faraataa cries, unheard. You burn our brothers! And the smoke rises, black and greasy, stinging Faraataa’s eyes, and he can remain aloft no more, and falls, and falls, and falls, and the Defilement is performed, and the doom of the city is assured, and all the world is lose with it.

Now the first light of day gleams in the east. It crosses the city and strikes the moon-crescent mounted on its high pole atop the stump of the Seventh Temple. The Prince To Come lifts his arm and gives the signal. The procession advances. As they march, Those Who Return shift form from moment to moment, in accordance with the teachings of the Book of the Water-Kings. They take on in turn the guises known as the Flame, the Flow, the Falling Leaf, the Blade, the Sands, the Wind. And as they pass the Place of Unchangingness they return themselves to the true Piurivar form, and maintain it thenceforth.

The Prince To Come embraces each of the four prisoners. Then they are led to the altars atop the Tables of the Gods. The Red Woman and the Flayed Man take the younger king and his mother to the east Table, where long ago the water-king Niznorn perished on the night of blasphemy. The Blind Giant and the Final King conduct the older king and the one who comes by night in dreams to the west Table, where the water-king Domsitor was given into death by the Defilers.

The Prince To Come stands alone atop the Seventh Temple. His aura now is scarlet. Faraataa descends and joins him and becomes him: they are one.

“In the beginning was the Defilement, when a madness came over us and we sinned against our brothers of the sea,” he cries. “And when we awakened and beheld what we had done, for that sin did we destroy our great city and go forth across the land. But even that was not sufficient, and enemies from afar were sent down upon us, and took from us all that we had, and drove us into the wilderness, which was our penance, for we had sinned against our brothers of the sea. And our ways were lost and our suffering was great and the face of the Most High was averted from us, until the time of the end of the penance came, and we found the strength to drive our oppressors from us and reclaim that which we had lost through our ancient sin. And so it was prophesied, that a prince would come among us and lead us out of exile at the time of the end of penance.”

“This is the time of the end of penance!” the people reply. “This is the time of the Prince To Come!”

“The Prince To Come has arrived!”

“And you are the Prince To Come!”

“I am the Prince To Come,” he cries. “Now all is forgiven. Now all debts have been paid. We have done our penance and are cleansed. The instruments of the penance have been driven from our land. The water-kings have had their recompense. Velalisier is rebuilt. Our life begins anew.”

“Our life begins anew! This is the time of the Prince To Come!”

Faraataa lifts his staff, which flashes like fire in the morning light, and signals to those who wait upon the two Tables of the Gods. The four prisoners are thrust forward.

The long knives flash. The dead kings fall, and crowns roll in the dust. In the blood of the invaders are the Tables washed clean, The last act has been played. Faraataa holds high his hands.

“Come, now, and rebuild with me the Seventh Temple!”

The Piurivar folk rush forward. They gather the fallen blocks of the temple and at Faraataa’s direction they place them where they once had been.

When it is complete, Faraataa stands at its highest point, and looks out across hundreds of miles to the sea, where the water-kings have gathered. He sees them beating the surface of the water with their great wings. He sees them lift their huge heads high and snort.

“Brothers! Brothers!” Faraataa calls to them.

“We hear you, land-brother.”

“The enemy is destroyed. The city is reconsecrated. The Seventh Temple has risen again. Is our penance done, O brothers?”

And they reply: “It is done. The world is cleansed and a new age begins.”

“Are we forgiven?”

“You are forgiven, O land-brothers.”

“We are forgiven,” cries the Prince To Come.

And the people hold up their hands to him, and change their shapes, and become in turn the Star, the Mist, the Darkness, the Gleam, the Cavern.

And only one thing remains, which is to forgive those who committed the first sin, and who have remained in bondage here amidst the ruins ever since. The Prince To Come stretches forth his hands, and reaches out to them, and tells them that the curse that was upon them is lifted and they are free.

And the stones of fallen Velalisier give up their dead, and the spirits emerge, pale and transparent; and they take on life and color; and they dance and shift their shapes, and cry out in joy.

And what they cry is:

“All hail the Prince To Come, who is the King That Is!”

That was the dream of the Piurivar Faraataa, as he lay on a couch of bubblebush leaves under a great dwikka-tree in the province of Piurifayne, with a light rain falling.

3

The Coronal said, “Ask Y-Uulisaan to come in here.”

Maps and charts of the blighted zones of Zimroel, heavily marked and annotated, were spread out all over the desk in Lord Valentine’s cabin aboard his flagship, the Lady Thiin. This was the third day of the voyage. He had departed from Alaisor with a fleet of five vessels under the command of the Grand Admiral Asenhart, bound for the port of Numinor on the Isle of Sleep’s northeastern coast. The crossing would be a journey of many weeks, even under the most favorable of winds, and just now the winds were contrary.

While he waited for the agricultural expert to arrive, Valentine scanned once more the documents Y-Uulisaan had prepared for him and those that he had called up out of the historical archives. It was perhaps the fiftieth time he had looked them over since leaving Alaisor, and the story they told grew no less melancholy with repetition.

Blights and pestilences, he knew, were as old as agriculture itself. There was no reason why Majipoor, fortunate world though it was, should be entirely exempt from such ills, and indeed the archives showed ample precedent for the present troubles. There had been serious disruptions of crops through disease or drought or insect attack in a dozen reigns or more, and major ones in at least five: that of Setiphon and Lord Stanidor, that of Thraym and Lord Vildivar, that of Struin and Lord Guadeloom, that of Kanaba and Lord Sirruth, and in the time of Signor and Lord Melikand, deep in the misty recesses of the past.

But what was happening now seemed far more threatening than any of those, Valentine thought, and not merely because it was a present crisis rather than something safely entombed in the archives. The population of Majipoor was immensely greater than it had been during any of the earlier pestilences: twenty billion, where in Struin’s time, say, it had been scarcely a sixth as much, and in Signor’s only a relative handful. A population so huge could fall easily into famine if its agricultural base were disrupted. The structure of society itself might collapse. Valentine was well aware that the stability of the Majipoori way over so many thousands of years—so contrary to the experience of most civilizations—was founded on the extraordinarily benign nature of life on the giant planet. Because no one was ever in real need, there was nearly universal acquiescence in the order of things and even in the inequalities of the social order. But take away the certainty of a full belly and all the rest might fall apart overnight.

And these dark dreams of his, these visions of chaos, and the strange omens—wind-spiders drifting over Alhanroel, and other such things—all of that instilled in him a sense of grim danger, of unique peril.

“My lord, Y-Uulisaan is here,” said Sleet.

The agricultural expert entered, looking hesitant and ill at ease. In an awkward way he began to make the starburst gesture that etiquette demanded. Valentine shook his head impatiently and beckoned Y-Uulisaan to take a seat. He pointed to the zone marked in red along the Dulorn Rift.

“How important a crop is lusavender?”

Y-Uulisaan said, “Essential, my lord. It forms the basis for carbohydrate assimilation in all of northern and western Zimroel.”

“And if severe shortages develop?”

“It might be possible to create diet supplements using such foods as stajja.”

“But there’s a stajja blight too!”

“Indeed, my lord. And milaile, which fulfills similar nutritional needs, is suffering from root weevils, as I have shown you. Therefore we can project general hardship in this entire sector of Zimroel within six to nine months—”

With the tip of a finger Y-Uulisaan drew a broad circle over the map covering a territory that ran almost from Ni-moya in the east to Pidruid on the western coast, and southward as far as Velathys. What was the population of that territory, Valentine wondered? Two and a half billion, perhaps? He tried to imagine two and a half billion hungry people, accustomed all their lives to a plentitude of food, crowding into the cities of Til-omon, Narabal, Pidruid—

Valentine said, “The imperial granaries will be able to meet the need in the short run. Meanwhile we’ll endeavor to get these blights under control. Lusavender smut was a problem a century or so ago, so I understand, and it was beaten then.”

“Through extreme measures, my lord. Whole provinces were quarantined. Entire farms were put to the torch, and afterward scraped bare of topsoil. The cost ran into the many millions of royals.”

“What does money matter when people are starving? We’ll do it again. If we begin an immediate program in the lusavender-growing regions, how long do you estimate it’ll take to return things to normal?”

Y-Uulisaan was silent a moment, rubbing his thumbs reflectively against his strangely broad and sharp cheekbones. At length he said:

“Five years, minimum. More likely ten.”

“Impossible!”

“The smut spreads swiftly. Probably a thousand acres have been infested during the time we have been talking this afternoon, my lord. The problem will be to contain it, before we can eradicate it.”

“And the niyk-tree disease? Is that spreading as fast?”

“Faster, my lord. And it appears to be linked to the decline of the stajja plants that are usually grown in conjunction with niyk.”

Valentine stared toward the cabin wall, and saw only a gray nothingness.

He said after a time, “Whatever this costs, we’ll defeat it. Y-Uulisaan, I want you to draw up a plan for countering each of these blights, and I want estimates of expense. Can you do that?”

“Yes, my lord,”

To Sleet the Coronal said, “We’ll have to coordinate our efforts with those of the Pontificate. Tell Ermanar to open contact at once with the minister of agricultural affairs at the Labyrinth—find out what if anything he knows of what’s going on in Zimroel, what steps are proposed, and so forth.”

Tunigorn said, “My lord, I’ve just spoken with Ermanar. He’s already been in touch with the Pontificate.”

“And?”

“The ministry of agricultural affairs knows nothing. In fact the post of minister of agricultural affairs itself is currently vacant.”

“Vacant? How?”

Quietly Tunigorn said, “I understand that with the incapacitation of the Pontifex Tyeveras, many high posts have been left unfilled in recent years, my lord, and therefore a certain slowing of Pontifical functions has developed. But you can learn much more on this point from Ermanar himself, since he is our chief liaison with the Labyrinth. Shall I send for him?”

“Not at the moment,” said Valentine bleakly. He turned back to Y-Uulisaan’s maps. Running his finger up and down the length of the Dulorn Rift, he said, “The two worst problems seem to be concentrated in this area. But according to the charts, there are significant lusavender-growing zones elsewhere, in the flatlands between Thagobar and the northern boundaries of Piurifayne, and over here south of Ni-moya stretching down to the outskirts of Gihorna. Am I correct?”

“You are, my lord,” Y-Uulisaan said.

“Therefore our first line of priority must be to keep the lusavender smut out of those regions.” He looked up, at Sleet, Tunigorn, Deliamber. “Notify the dukes of the affected provinces at once that all traffic between the smut-infested zones and the healthy lusavender districts is halted at once: a complete closing of the borders. If they don’t like it, let them send a delegation to the Mount to complain to Elidath. Oh, and notify Elidath of what’s going on, too. Settlement of unpaid trade balances can be routed through Pontifical channels for the time being. Hornkast had better be told to be prepared for a lot of screaming, I suppose. Next: in the stajja-growing districts—”

For close to an hour a stream of instructions flowed from the Coronal, until every immediate aspect of the crisis appeared to be covered. He turned often to Y-Uulisaan for advice, and always the agricultural expert had something useful to offer. There was something curiously unlikable about the man, Valentine thought, something remote and chilly and overly self-contained, but he was plainly well versed in the minutiae of Zimroel agriculture, and it was a tremendous stroke of good luck that he had turned up in Alaisor just in time to sail for Zimroel with the royal flagship.

All the same, Valentine was left with an odd feeling of futility when the meeting broke up. He had given dozens of orders, had sent messages far and wide, had taken firm and decisive action to contain and eradicate these pestilences. And yet, and yet—he was only one mortal man, in a small cabin aboard a tiny ship tossing in the midst of an immense sea that was itself only a puddle on this gigantic world, and at this moment invisible organisms were spreading blight and death over thousands of acres of fertile farmland, and what could all his bold orders do against the inexorable march of those forces of doom? Yet again he felt himself slipping into a mood of hopeless depression, so alien to his true nature. Perhaps I have some pestilence in me, he thought. Perhaps I am infested with some blight that robs me of my hope and cheer and buoyancy, and I am condemned now to live out my days in sullen misery.

He closed his eyes. Once more came that image out of his dream in the Labyrinth, an image that haunted him endlessly: great crevasses appearing in the solid foundations of the world, and huge slabs of land rearing up at steep angles to crash against their neighbors, and he in the midst of it all, desperately trying to hold the world together. And failing, failing, failing.

Is there a curse on me? he wondered. Why am I chosen, out of all the hundreds of Coronals that have been, to preside over the destruction of our world?

He looked into his soul and found no dark sin there that might be bringing the vengeance of the Divine upon him and upon Majipoor. He had not coveted the throne; he had not schemed to overthrow his brother; he had not made wrongful use of the power he had never expected to gain; he had not—

He had not—

He had not—

Valentine shook his head angrily. This was foolishness and a waste of spirit. A few coincidental troubles among the farmers were occurring, and he had had a few bad dreams; it was preposterous to exaggerate that into some kind of dread cosmic calamity. All would be well in time. The pestilences would be contained. His reign would be known in history for unusual troubles, yes, but also for harmony, balance, happiness. You are a good king, he told himself. You are a good man. You have no reason to doubt yourself.

The Coronal rose, left his cabin, went out on deck. It was late afternoon; the swollen bronze sun hung low in the west, and one of the moons was just rising to the north. The sky was stained with colors: auburn, turquoise, violet, amber, gold. A band of clouds lay thick on the horizon. He stood alone by the rail for a time, drawing the salt air deep into his lungs. All would be well in time, Valentine told himself once again. But imperceptibly he felt himself slipping back into uneasiness and distress. There seemed no escaping that mood for long. Never in his life had he been plunged so often into gloom and despair. He did not recognize the Valentine that he had become, that morbid man forever on the edge of sadness. He was a stranger to himself.

“Valentine?”

It was Carabella. He forced himself to thrust aside his forebodings, and smiled, and offered her his hand.

“What a beautiful sunset,” she said.

“Magnificent. One of the best in history. Although they say there was a better one in the reign of Lord Confalume, on the fourteenth day of—”

“This is the best one, Valentine. Because this is the one we have tonight.” She slipped her arm through his, and stood beside him in silence. He found it hard, just then, to understand why he had been so profoundly grim-spirited such a short while ago. All would be well. All would be well.

Then Carbella said, “Is that a sea dragon out there?”

“Sea dragons never enter these waters, love.”

“Then I’m hallucinating. But it’s a very convincing one. You don’t see it?”

“Where am I supposed to look?”

“There. Do you see over there, where there’s a track of color reflected on the ocean, all purple and gold? Now go just to the left. There. There.”

Valentine narrowed his eyes and peered intently out to sea. At first he saw nothing; then he thought it might be some huge log, drifting on the waves; and then a last shaft of sunlight cutting through the clouds lit up the sea, and he saw it clearly: a sea dragon, yes, unquestionably a dragon, swimming slowly northward by itself.

He felt a chill, and huddled his arms against his breast.

Sea dragons, he knew, moved only in herds; and they traveled a predictable path about the world, always in southern waters, going from west to east along the bottom of Zimroel, up the Gihorna coast to Piliplok, then eastward below the Isle of Sleep and along the torrid southern coast of Alhanroel until they were safely out into the uncharted reaches of the Great Sea. Yet here was a dragon, by itself, heading north. And as Valentine stared, the great creature brought its black enormous wings up into the air, and beat them against the water in a slow, determined way, slap and slap and slap and slap, as though it meant to do the impossible and lift itself from the sea, and fly off like some titanic bird toward the mist-shrouded polar reaches.

“How strange,” Carabella murmured. “Have you ever seen one do anything like that?”

“Never. Never.” Valentine shivered. “Omen upon omen, Carabella. What am I being told by all this?”

“Come. Let’s go in, and have a warm mug of wine.”

“No. Not yet.”

He stood as if chained to the deck, straining his eyes to make out that dark figure against the darkness of the sea in the gathering dimness of the evening. Again and again the huge wings flailed the sea, until at last the dragon furled them in, and raised its long neck high and threw back its heavy three-cornered head and let out a booming mournful cry that resounded like a foghorn cutting through the dusk. Then it slipped below the surface and was lost entirely to his sight.

4

Whenever it rained, and at this time of the year in Prestimion Vale it rained all the time, the sour odor of charred vegetation rose from the burned fields and infiltrated everything. As Aximaan Threysz shuffled into the municipal meeting-hall in the center of town, her daughter Heynok guiding her carefully with a hand to her elbow, she could smell the scent of it even here, miles from the nearest of the torched plantations.

There was no escaping it. It lay upon the land like floodwaters. The acrid reek found its way through every door and every window. It penetrated to the cellars where the wine was stored, and tainted the sealed flasks. The meat on the table stank of it. It clung to one’s clothes and could not be rinsed away. It seeped through every pore and into one’s body, and fouled one’s flesh. It even entered the soul, Aximaan Threysz was beginning to believe. When the time came for her to return to the Source, if ever she was permitted to quit this interminable life, Aximaan Threysz was sure that the guardians of the bridge would halt her and coldly turn her back, saying with disdain, “We want no smell of vile ashes here, old woman. Take up your body again and go away.”

“Would you like to sit here, mother?” Heyrok asked.

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

“These are good seats. You’ll be able to hear well from here.”

There was a little commotion in the row as people shifted about, making room for her. Everyone treated her like a doddering old woman now. Well, of course she was old, monstrously old, a survivor out of Ossier’s time, so old that she remembered when Lord Tyeveras had been young, but there was nothing new about her being old, so why were they all suddenly so patronizing? She had no need of special treatment. She still could walk; she still could see well enough; she still could go out into the fields at harvest time and gather the pods—and gather—go out into—the fields— and—gather—

Aximaan Threysz, faltering just a little, fumbling about, took her seat. She heard murmurs of greeting, and acknowledged them in a remote way, for she was having trouble now in matching names and faces. When the Vale folk spoke with her these days it was always with condolence in their voices, as though there had been a death in her family. In a way, that was so. But not the death she was looking for, the death that was denied her, which was her own.

Perhaps that day would never come. It seemed to her that she was condemned to go on and on forever in this world of ruination and despair, tasting that pungent stench with every breath she drew.

She sat quietly, staring at nothing in particular.

Heynok said, “He’s very courageous, I think.”

“Who is?”

“Sempeturn. The man who’s going to speak tonight. They tried to stop him in Mazadone, saying that he preaches treason. But he spoke anyway, and now he’s traveling through all the farming provinces, trying to explain to us why the crops have been ruined. Everyone in the Vale is here tonight. It’s a very important event.”

“A very important event, yes,” said Aximaan Threysz, nodding. “Yes. A very important event.”

She felt a certain discomfort over the presence of so many people around her. It was months since she had last been in town. She rarely left the house any longer, but spent nearly all her days sitting in her bedroom with her back to the window, never once looking toward the plantation. But tonight Heynok had insisted. A very important event, she kept saying.

“Look! There he is, mother!”

Aximaan Threysz was vaguely aware that a human had stepped out on the platform, a short red-faced one with thick ugly black hair like the fur of an animal. That was strange, she thought, the way she had come in recent months to despise the look of humans, their soft flabby bodies, their pasty sweaty skins, their repellent hair, their weak watery eyes. He waved his arms about and began to speak in an ugly rasping voice.

“People of Prestimion Vale—my heart goes out to you in this moment of your trial—this darkest hour, this unexpected travail—this tragedy, this grief—”

So this was the important event, Aximaan Threysz thought. This noise, this wailing. Yes, undoubtedly important. Within moments she had lost the thread of what he was saying, but it was plainly important, because the words that wandered up from the platform to her had an important sound: “Doom… destiny… punishment… transgression… innocence… shame… deceit…” But the words, important though they might be, floated past her like little transparent winged creatures.

For Aximaan Threysz the last important event had already happened, and there would be no others in her life. After the discovery of the lusavender smut her fields had been the first to be burned. The agricultural agent Yerewain Noor, looking deeply grieved, making endless fluttery apologies, had posted a notice of labor levy in the town, tacking up the sign on the door of this same municipal hall where Aximaan Threysz sat now, and one Starday morning every able-bodied worker in Prestimion Vale had come to her plantation to carry out the torching. Spreading the fuel carefully on the perimeter, making long crosses of it down the center of the fields, casting the firebrands—

And then Mikhyain’s land, and Sobor Simithot’s, and Palver’s, and Nitikkimal’s—

All gone, the whole Vale, black and charred, the lusavender and the rice. There would be no harvest next season. The silos would stand empty, the weighing bins would rust, the summer sun would shed its warmth on a universe of ashes. It was very much like a sending of the King of Dreams, Aximaan Threysz thought. You settled down for your two months of winter rest, and then into your mind came terrifying visions of the destruction of everything you had labored to create, and as you lay there you felt the full weight of the King’s spirit on your soul, squeezing you, crushing you, telling you, This is your punishment, for you are guilty of wrongdoing.

“How do we know,” the man on the platform said, “that the person we call Lord Valentine is indeed the anointed Coronal, blessed by the Divine? How can we be certain of this?”

Aximaan Threysz sat suddenly forward, her attention caught.

“I ask you to consider the facts. We knew the Coronal Lord Voriax, and he was a dark-complected man, was he not? Eight years he ruled us, and he was wise, and we loved him. Did we not? And then the Divine in its infinite unknowable mercy took him from us too soon, and word came forth from the Mount that his brother Valentine was to be our Coronal, and he too was a dark-complected man. We know that. He came amongst us on the grand processional—oh, no, not here, not to this province, but he was seen in Piliplok, he was seen in Ni-moya, he was seen in Narabal, in Til-omon, in Pidruid, and he was dark-complected, with shining black eyes and a black beard, and no doubt of it that he was brother to his brother, and our legitimate Coronal.

“But then what did we hear? A man with golden hair and blue eyes arose, and said to the people of Alhanroel, I am the true Coronal, driven from my body by witchery, and the dark one is an impostor. And the people of Alhanroel made the starburst before him and bowed themselves down and cried hail. And when we in Zimroel were told that the man we thought was Coronal was not Coronal, we too accepted him, and accepted his tale of witchery-changes, and these eight years he has had the Castle and held the government. Is that not so, that we took the golden-haired Lord Valentine in the place of the dark-haired Lord Valentine?”

“Why, this is treason pure and simple,” shouted the planter Nitikkimal, sitting close by Aximaan Threysz. “His own mother the Lady accepted him as true!”

The man on the platform glanced up into the audience. “Aye, the Lady herself accepted him, and the Pontifex as well, and all the high lords and princes of Castle Mount. I do not deny that. And who am I to say they are wrong? They bow their knees to the golden-haired king. He is acceptable to them. He is acceptable to you. But is he acceptable to the Divine, my friends? I ask you, look about yourselves! This day I journeyed through Prestimion Vale. Where are the crops? Why are the fields not green with rich growth? I saw ashes! I saw death! Look you, the blight is on your land, and it spreads through the Rift each day, faster than you can burn your fields and purge the soil of the deadly spores. There will be no lusavender next season. There will be empty bellies in Zimroel. Who can remember such a time? There is a woman here whose life has spanned many reigns, and who is replete with the wisdom of years, and has she ever seen such a time? I speak to you, Aximaan Threysz, whose name is respected throughout the province—your fields were put to the torch, your crops were spoiled, your life is blighted in its glorious closing years—”

“Mother, he’s talking about you,” Heynok whispered sharply.

Aximaan Threysz shook her head uncomprehendingly. She had lost herself in the torrent of words. “Why are we here? What is he saying?”

“What do you say, Aximaan Threysz? Has the blessing of the Divine been withdrawn from Prestimion Vale? You know it has! But not by your sin, or the sin of anyone here! I say to you that it is the wrath of the Divine, falling impartially upon the world, taking the lusavender from Prestimion Vale and the milaile from Ni-moya and the stajja from Falkynkip and who knows what crop will be next, what plague will be loosed upon us, and all because a false Coronal—”

“Treason! Treason!”

“A false Coronal, I tell you, sits upon the Mount and falsely rules—a golden-haired usurper who—”

“Ah, has the throne been usurped again?” Aximaan Threysz murmured. “It was just the other year, when we heard tales of it, that someone had taken the throne wrongfully—”

“I say, let him prove to us that he is the chosen of the Divine! Let him come amongst us on his grand processional and stand before us and show us that he is the true Coronal! I think he will not do it. I think he cannot do it. And I think that so long as we suffer him to hold the Castle, the wrath of the Divine will fall upon us in ever more dreadful ways, until—”

“Treason!”

“Let him speak!”

Heynok touched Aximaan Threysz’s arm. “Mother, are you all right?”

“Why are they so angry? What are they shouting?”

“Perhaps I should take you home, mother.”

“I say, down with the usurper!”

“And I say, call the proctors, arraign this man for treason.”

Aximaan Threysz looked about her in confusion. It seemed that everyone was on his feet now, shouting. Such noise! Such uproar! And that strange smell in the air—that smell of damp burned things, what was that? It stung her nostrils. Why were they shouting so much?

“Mother?”

“We’ll begin putting in the new crop tomorrow, won’t we? And so we should go home now. Isn’t that so, Heynok?”

“Oh, mother, mother—”

“The new crop—”

“Yes,” Heynok said. “We’ll be planting in the morning. We should go now.”

“Down with all usurpers! Long life to the true Coronal!”

“Long life to the true Coronal!” Aximaan Threysz cried suddenly, rising to her feet. Her eyes flashed; her tongue flickered. She felt young again, full of life and vigor. Into the fields at dawn tomorrow, spread the seeds and lovingly cover them, and offer the prayers, and—

No. No. No.

The mist cleared from her mind. She remembered everything. The fields were charred. They must lie fallow, the agricultural agent had said, for three more years, while the smut spores were being purged. That was the strange smell: the burned stems and leaves. Fires had raged for days. The rain stirred the odor and made it rise into the air. There would be no harvest this year, or the next, or the next.

“Fools,” she said.

“Who do you mean, mother?”

Aximaan Threysz waved her hand in a wide circle. “All of them. To cry out against the Coronal. To think that this is the vengeance of the Divine. Do you think the Divine wants to punish us that badly? We will all starve, Heynok, because the smut has killed the crop, and it makes no difference who is Coronal. It makes no difference at all. Take me home.”

“Down with the usurper!” came the cry again, and it rang in her ears like the tolling of a funeral bell as she strode from the hall.

5

Elidath said, looking carefully around the council room at the assembled princes and dukes, “The orders are in Valentine’s hand and signed with Valentine’s seal, and they are unmistakably genuine. The boy is to be raised to the principate at the earliest possible appropriate time.”

“And you think that time has come?” asked Divvis coldly.

The High Counsellor met Divvis’s angry gaze evenly. “I do.”

“By what do you judge?”

“His instructors tell me that he has mastered the essence of all the teachings.”

“So then he can name all the Coronals from Stiamot to Malibor in the correct order! What does that prove?”

“The teachings are more than merely lists of kings, Divvis, as I hope you have not forgotten. He has had the full training and he comprehends it. The Synods and Decretals, the Balances, the Code of Provinces, and all the rest: I trust you recall those things? He has been examined, and he is flawless. His understanding is deep and wise. And he has shown courage, too. In the crossing of the ghazan-tree plain he slew the malorn. Did you know that, Divvis? Not merely eluded it, but slew it. He is extraordinary.”

“I think that word is the right one,” said Duke Elzandir of Chorg. “I have ridden with him on the hunt, in the forests above Ghiseldorn. He moves quickly, and with a natural grace. His mind is alert. His wit is agile. He knows what gaps exist in his knowledge, and he takes pains to fill them. He should be elevated at once.”

“This is madness!” cried Divvis, slapping the flat of his hand several times angrily against the council-hall table. “Absolute raving madness!”

“Calmly, calmly,” Mirigant said. “Such shouting as this is unseemly, Divvis.”

“The boy is too young to be a prince!”

“And let us not forget,” the Duke of Halanx added, “that he is of low birth.”

Quietly Stasilaine said, “How old is he, Elidath?”

The High Counsellor shrugged. “Twenty. Twenty-one, perhaps. Young, I agree. But hardly a child.”

“You called him ‘the boy’ yourself a moment ago,” the Duke of Halanx pointed out.

Elidath turned his hands palm upward. “A figure of speech and nothing more. He has a youthful appearance, I grant you. But that’s only because he’s so slight of build, and short of stature. Boyish, perhaps: but not a boy.”

“Not yet a man, either,” observed Prince Manganot of Banglecode.

“By what definition?” Stasilaine asked.

“Look about you in this room,” Prince Manganot said. “Here you see the definition of manhood. You, Stasilaine: anyone can see the strength of you. Walk as a stranger through the streets of any city, Stee, Normork, Bibiroon, simply walk through the streets, and people will automatically defer to you, having no notion of your rank or name. Elidath the same. Divvis. Mirigant. My royal brother of Dundilmir. We are men. He is not.”

“We are princes,” said Stasilaine, “and have been for many years. A certain bearing comes to us in time, from long awareness of our station. But were we like this twenty years ago?”

“I think so,” Manganot said.

Mirigant laughed. “I remember some of you when you were at Hissune’s age. Loud and braggartly, yes, and if that makes one a man, then you surely were men. But otherwise— ah, I think it is all a circular thing, that princely bearing comes of feeling princely, and we put it on ourselves as a cloak. Look at us in our finery, and then cover us in farmer’s clothes and set us down in some seaport of Zimroel, and who will bow to us then? Who will give deference?”

“He is not princely now and never will be,” said Divvis sullenly, “He is a ragged boy out of the Labyrinth, and nothing more than that.”

“I still maintain that we can’t elevate a stripling like that to our rank,” said Prince Manganot of Banglecode.

“They say that Prestimion was short of stature,” the Duke of Chorg remarked. “I think his reign is generally deemed to have been successful, nevertheless.”

The venerable Cantalis, nephew of Tyeveras, looked up suddenly out of an hour’s silence and said in amazement, “You compare him with Prestimion, Elzandir? What precisely is it that we are doing, then? Are we creating a prince or choosing a Coronal?”

“Any prince is a potential Coronal,” Divvis said. “Let us not forget that.”

“And the choosing of the next Coronal must soon occur, no doubt of that,” the Duke of Halanx said. “It’s utterly scandalous that Valentine has kept the old Pontifex alive this long, but sooner or later—”

“This is altogether out of order,” Elidath said sharply.

“I think not,” said Manganot. “If we make him a prince, there’s nothing stopping Valentine from putting him eventually on the Confalume Throne itself.”

“These speculations are absurd,” Mirigant said.

“Are they, Mirigant? What absurdities have we not already seen from Valentine? To take a juggler-girl as his wife, and a Vroon wizard as one of his chief ministers, and the rest of his raggle-taggle band of wanderers surrounding him as a court within the court, while we are pushed to the outer rim—”

“Be cautious, Manganot,” Stasilaine said. “There are those in this room that love Lord Valentine.”

“There is no one here who does not,” Manganot retorted. “You may be aware, and Mirigant can surely confirm it, that upon the death of Voriax I was one of the strongest advocates of letting the crown pass to Valentine. I yield to no one in my love of him. But we need not love him uncritically. He is capable of folly, as are we all. And I say it is folly to take a twenty-year-old boy from the back alleys of the Labyrinth and make him a prince of the realm.”

Stasilaine said, “How old were you, Manganot, when you had your princehood? Sixteen? Eighteen? And you, Divvis? Seventeen, I think? Elidath, you?”

“It is different with us,” said Divvis. “We were born to rank. I am the son of a Coronal. Manganot is of the high family of Banglecode. Elidath—”

“The point remains,” Stasilaine said, “that when we were much younger than Hissune we were already at this rank. As was Valentine himself. It is a question of qualification, not of age. And Elidath assures us that he is qualified.”

“Have we ever had a prince created out of commoner stock?” the Duke of Halanx asked. “Think, I beg you: what is this new prince of Valentine’s? A child of the Labyrinth streets, a beggar-boy, or perhaps a pickpocket—”

“You have no true knowledge of that,” said Stasilaine. “You give us mere slander, I think.”

“Is it not the case that he was a beggar in the Labyrinth when Valentine first found him?”

“He was only a child then,” said Elzandir. “And the story is that he hired himself out as a guide, and gave good value for the money, though he was only ten years old. But all of that is beside the point. We need not care about what he was. It is what he is that concerns us, and what he is to be. The Coronal Lord has asked us to make him a prince when, in Elidath’s judgment, the time is right. Elidath tells us that the time is right. Therefore this debate is pointless.”

“No,” Divvis said. “Valentine is not absolute. He requires our consent to this thing.”

“Ah, and would you overrule the will of the Coronal?” asked the Duke of Chorg.

Divvis, after a pause, said, “If my conscience bade me do so, I would, yes. Valentine is not infallible. There are times when I disagree greatly with him. This is one.”

“Ever since the changing of his body,” said Prince Manganot of Banglecode, “I have noted a change also in his personality, an inclination toward the romantic, toward the fantastic, that perhaps was present in him before the usurpation but which never was evident in any significant way, and which now manifests itself in a whole host of—”

“Enough!” said Elidath in exasperation. “We are required to debate this nomination, and we have done so, and I make an end to it now. The Coronal Lord offers us the knight-initiate Hissune son of Elsinome, for elevation to the principate with full privileges of rank. As High Counsellor and Regent I place the nomination before you with my seconding vote. If there is no opposition, I propose it to be recorded that he is elevated by acclamation.”

“Opposed,” said Divvis.

“Opposed,” said Prince Manganot of Banglecode.

“Opposed,” said the Duke of Halanx.

“Are there any others here,” asked Elidath slowly, “who wish to be placed on record in opposition to the will of the Coronal Lord?”

Prince Nimian of Dundilmir, who had not previously spoken, now declared, “There is an implied threat in those words to which I take exception, Elidath.”

“Your exception is duly noted, although no threat is intended. How do you vote, Nimian?”

“Opposed.”

“So be it. Four stand in opposition, which falls well short of a carrying number. Stasilaine, will you ask Prince Hissune to enter the council-chamber?” Glancing about the room, Elidath added, “If any who cast opposing votes wish now to withdraw them, this is the moment.”

“Let my vote stand,” the Duke of Halanx said at once.

“And mine,” said the Prince of Banglecode, and Nimian of Dundilmir also.

“And what says the son of Lord Voriax?” Elidath asked.

Divvis smiled. “I change my vote. The thing is done: let it have my support as well.”

At that Manganot rose halfway from his seat, gaping in astonishment, face coloring. He began to say something, but Divvis cut short his words with an upraised hand and a sharp sudden glare. Frowning, shaking his head in bewilderment, Manganot subsided. The Duke of Halanx whispered something to Prince Nimian, who shrugged and made no reply.

Stasilaine returned, with Hissune beside him, clad in a simple white robe with a golden splash on the left shoulder. His face was lightly flushed, his eyes were unnaturally bright, but he was otherwise calm and contained.

Elidath said, “By nomination of the Coronal Lord Valentine and the acclamation of these high lords, we name you to the principate of Majipoor, with full rank and privilege.”

Hissune bowed his head. “I am moved beyond words, my lords. I can barely express my gratitude to you all for bestowing this unimaginable honor upon me.”

Then he looked up, and his gaze traveled through the room, resting for a moment on Nimian, and on Manganot, and on the Duke of Halanx, and then, for a long while, on Divvis, who returned his stare coolly and with a faint smile.

6

That lone sea dragon, so strangely beating its wings against the water at twilight, was a harbinger of stranger things to come. In the third week of the voyage from Alaisor to the Isle of Sleep an entire herd of the huge creatures suddenly manifested itself off the starboard side of the Lady Thiin.

Pandelume, the pilot, a Skandar with deep blue fur who once had hunted sea dragons for her livelihood, was the first to sight them, just after dawn, as she was taking her sightings from the observation deck. She carried the news to Asenhart the Grand Admiral, who conferred with Autifon Deliamber, who took it upon himself to awaken the Coronal.

Valentine went quickly to the deck. By now the sun had come up out of Alhanroel and cast long shadows upon the waters. The pilot handed him her seeing-tube and he put it to his eye, and she trained it for him on the shapes that moved through the sea far in the distance.

He stared, seeing little at first except the gentle swells of the open sea, then shifting his gaze slightly to the north and refining his focus to bring the sea dragons into view: dark humped shapes thronging the water, moving in close formation, swimming with strange purposefulness. Now and again a long neck rose high above the surface, or vast wings were fanned and fluttered and spread out on the bosom of the sea.

“There must be a hundred of them,” cried Valentine, amazed.

“More than that, my lord,” said Pandelume. “Never while I was hunting them did I encounter a herd so big. Can you see the kings? Five of them, at least. And half a dozen more, nearly as large. And dozens of cows, and young ones, too many to count—”

“I see them,” Valentine said. In the center of the group was a small phalanx of animals of monstrous size, all but submerged, but their spine-ridges cleaving the surface. “Six big ones, I’d say. Monsters—bigger even than the one that shipwrecked me when I sailed on the Brangalyn! And in the wrong waters. What are they doing here? Asenhart, have you ever heard of sea-dragon herds coming up this side of the Isle?”

“Never, my lord,” the Hjort said “somberly. “For thirty years I have sailed between Numinor and Alaisor and never once seen a dragon. Never once! And now an entire herd—”

“The Lady be thanked they’re moving away from us,” said Sleet.

“But why are they here at all?” Valentine asked.

No one had an answer to that. It seemed unreasonable that the movements of sea dragons through the inhabited parts of Majipoor should so suddenly undergo drastic change, when for thousands of years the marine herds had with extraordinary loyalty followed well-worn roads in the sea.

Placidly did each herd take the same route on each of its lengthy migrations around the world, to the dragons’ great loss, for the dragon hunters out of Piliplok, knowing where to find them, fell upon them each year in the proper season and worked a fearful slaughter on them so that dragon meat and dragon oil and dragon milk and dragon bones and many another dragon-derived product might be sold at high profit in the marketplaces of the world. Still the dragons traveled as they always had traveled. The vagaries of winds and currents and temperatures sometimes might induce them to shift some hundreds of miles north or south of their customary paths, probably because the sea creatures on which they fed had shifted, but nothing like this departure had ever been seen before—a whole herd of dragons curving up the eastern side of the Isle of Sleep and apparently making for the polar regions, instead of passing south of the Isle and the coast of Alhanroel to enter the waters of the Great Sea.

Nor was this the only such herd. Five days later another was sighted: a smaller group, no more than thirty, with no giants among them, that passed within a mile or two of the fleet. Uncomfortably close, said Admiral Asenhart: for the ships bearing the Coronal and his party to the Isle carried no weaponry of any significant sort, and sea dragons were creatures of uncertain temper and formidable power, much given to shattering such hapless vessels as might stumble across their paths at the wrong moment.

Six weeks remained to the voyage. In dragon-infested seas that would seem like a very long while.

“Perhaps we should turn back, and make this crossing at another season,” suggested Tunigorn, who had never been to sea before and had not been finding the experience much to his liking even before this.

Sleet also seemed more than uneasy about the journey; Asenhart appeared troubled; Carabella spent much time peering moodily to sea, as if expecting a dragon to breach the water just beneath the Lady Thiin’s hull. But Valentine, although he had known the fury of the sea dragon at first hand himself, having been not merely shipwrecked by one but indeed swept into its cavernous gut in the most bizarre of the adventures of his years of exile, would not hear of it. It was essential to continue, he insisted. He must confer with the Lady; he must inspect blight-stricken Zimroel; to return to Alhanroel, he felt, was to abdicate all responsibility. And what reason was there, anyway, to think that these strayed sea dragons meant any harm to the fleet? They seemed bound with great swiftness and intentness upon their mysterious route, and paid no heed to any of the ships that passed by them.

Yet a third group of dragons appeared, a week after the second. These were some fifty in number, with three giants among them. “It seems the entire year’s migration must be going north,” Pandelume said. There were, she explained, about a dozen separate dragon populations, that traveled at widely separated intervals about the world. No one knew exactly how long it took for each herd to complete the circumnavigation, but it could perhaps be decades. Each of these populations broke up, as it went, into smaller herds, but all moved in the same general way; and this entire population, evidently, had diverted itself to the new northward path.

Drawing Deliamber aside, Valentine asked the Vroon whether his perceptions brought him any understanding of these movements of the sea dragons. The little being’s many tentacles coiled intricately in the gesture that Valentine had long since come to interpret as a sign of distress; but all he would say was, “I feel the strength of them, and it is a very strong strength indeed. You know that they are not stupid animals.”

“I understand that a body of such size might well have a brain to match.”

“Such is the case. I reach forth and I feel their presence, and I sense great determination, great discipline. But what course it is that they are bound upon, my lord, I cannot tell you this day.”

Valentine attempted to make light of the danger. “Sing me the ballad of Lord Malibor,” he told Carabella one evening as they all sat at table. She looked at him oddly, but he smiled and persisted, and at last she took up her pocket harp and struck up the roistering old tune:

Lord Malibor was fine and bold

And loved the heaving sea,

Lord Malibor came off the Mount,

A hunter for to be.

Lord Malibor prepared his ship,

A gallant sight was she,

With sails all of beaten gold,

And masts of ivory.

And Valentine, recalling the words now, joined in:

Lord Malibor stood at the helm

And faced the heaving wave,

And sailed in quest of the dragon free,

The dragon fierce and brave.

Lord Malibor a challenge called,

His voice did boom and ring,

“I wish to meet, I wish to fight,”

Quoth he, “the dragon king.”

Tunigorn shifted about uncomfortably and swirled the wine in his bowl. “This song, I think, is unlucky, my lord,” he muttered.

“Fear nothing,” said Valentine. “Come, sing with us!”

“I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,

And came across the sea

Twelve miles long and three miles wide

And two miles deep was he.

Lord Malibor stood on the deck

And fought both hard and well.

Thick was the blood that flowed that day

And great the blows that fell.

The pilot Pandelume entered the mess-hall now, and approached the Coronal’s table, halting with a look of some bewilderment on her thick-furred face as she heard the song. Valentine signaled her to join in, but her expression grew more gloomy, and she stood apart, scowling.

But dragon kings are old and sly,

And rarely are they beaten.

Lord Malibor, for all his strength

Eventually was eaten.

All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,

Of this grim tale take heed!

Despite all luck and skill, you may

End up as dragon feed.

“What is it, Pandelume?” Valentine asked, as the last raucous verse died away.

“Dragons, my lord, approaching out of the south.”

“Many?”

“A great many, my lord.”

“You see?” Tunigorn burst out. “We have summoned them, with this foolish song!”

“Then we will sing them on their way,” said Valentine, “with another round of it.” And he began again:

Lord Malibor was fine and bold

And loved the heaving sea—

The new herd was several hundred strong—a vast assemblage of sea dragons, a swarm so huge it passed all belief, with nine great kings at the center of the herd. Valentine, remaining outwardly calm, nevertheless felt a powerful sense of menace and danger, so strong it was almost tangible, emanating from the creatures. But they went by, none coming within three miles of the fleet, and disappeared rapidly to the north, swimming with a weird intensity of purpose.

In the depths of the night, as Valentine lay sleeping with his mind as ever open to the guidance that only dreams can bring, a strange vision imposed itself upon his soul. In the midst of a broad plain studded with angular rocks and odd pockmarked stiff-armed leafless plants a great multitude of people moves with an easy floating gait toward a distant sea. He finds himself among them, clad as they are in flowing robes of some gauzy white fabric that billows of its own accord, there being no breeze whatsoever. None of the faces about him is a familiar one, and yet he does not think of himself as being among strangers: he knows he is closely bound to these people, that they have been his fellow pilgrims on some trek that had lasted for many months, possibly even for years. And now the trek is arriving at its destination.

There lies the sea, many-hued, sparkling, its surface shifting as if roiled by the movements of titanic creatures far below, or perhaps in response to the tug of the swollen amber moon that rests heavily upon the sky. At the shore mighty waves rise up like bright curving crystalline claws, and fall back in utter silence, flailing the shining beaches weightlessly, as though they are not waves but merely the ghosts of waves.

And farther out, beyond all turbulence, a dark ponderous shape looms in the water.

It is a sea dragon; it is the dragon called Lord Kinniken’s dragon, that is said to be the largest of all its kind, the king of the sea dragons, which no hunter’s harpoon has ever touched. From its great humped bony-ridged back there streams an irresistible radiance, a mysterious shimmering amethystine glow that fills the sky and stains the water a deep violet. And there is the sound of bells, huge and deep, ringing out a steady solemn peal, a dark clangor that threatens to split the world in two at the core.

The dragon swims inexorably shoreward, and its huge mouth gapes like the mouth of a cavern.

—My hour at last has come, says the king of dragons, and you are mine.

The pilgrims, caught, drawn, mesmerized by the rich pulsating light that streams from the dragon, float onward toward the rim of the sea, toward that gaping mouth.

—Yes. Yes. Come to me. I am the water-king Maazmoorn, and you are mine!

Now the dragon king has reached the shallows, and the waves part for him, and he moves with ease onto the beach. The pealing of the bells grows louder still: insistently that terrible sound conquers the atmosphere and presses down upon it, so that with each new tolling the air grows thicker, slower, warmer. The dragon-king has unfurled the pair of colossal winglike fins that sprout from thick fleshy bases behind his head, and the wings thrust him onward over the wet sand. As he pulls his ponderous form to land, the first pilgrims reach him and without hesitation float on into the titanic maw and disappear; and behind them come others, an unending procession of willing sacrifices, racing forward to meet the dragon-king as he lurches landward to take them in.

And they enter the great mouth, and are engulfed into it, and Valentine is among them, and he goes down deep into the pit of the dragon’s stomach. He enters a vaulted chamber of infinite size, and finds it already occupied by the legion of the swallowed, millions, billions—humans and Skandars and Vroons and Hjorts and Liimen and Su-Suheris and Ghayrogs, all the many peoples of Majipoor, impartially caught up in the gullet of the dragon-king.

And still Maazmoorn goes forward, deeper upon the land, and still the dragon-king feeds. He swallows all the world, gulping and gulping and still more ravenously gulping, devouring cities and mountains, the continents and the seas, taking within himself the totality of Majipoor, until at last he has taken it all, and lies coiled around the planet like a swollen serpent that has eaten some enormous globular creature.

The bells ring out a paean of triumph.

—Now at last has my kingdom come!

After the dream had left him Valentine did not return to full wakefulness, but allowed himself to drift into middlesleep, the place of sensitive receptivity, and there he lay, calm, quiet, reliving the dream, entering again that all-devouring mouth, analyzing, attempting to interpret.

Then the first light of morning fell upon him, and he came up to consciousness. Carabella lay beside him, awake, watching him. He slipped his arm about her shoulder and let his hand rest fondly, playfully, on her breast.

“Was it a sending?” she asked.

“No, I felt no presence of the Lady, nor of the King.” He smiled. “You know always when I dream, don’t you?”

“I could see the dream come upon you. Your eyes moved beneath the lids; your lip twitched; your nostrils moved like those of some hunting animal.”

“Did I look troubled?”

“No, not at all. Perhaps at first you frowned; but then you smiled in your sleep, and a great calmness came over you, as if you were going forth toward some preordained fate and you accepted it entirely.”

He laughed. “Ah, then I’ll be gulped again by a sea dragon!”

“Is that what you dreamed?”

“More or less. Not the way it actually happened, though. This was the Kinniken dragon coming up on shore, and I marched right down its gullet. As did everyone else in the world, I think. And then it ate the world as well.”

“And can you speak your dream?” she asked.

“In patches and fragments only,” he said. “The wholeness of it still eludes me.”

It was too simple, he knew, to call the dream merely a replaying of an event of his past, as though he had plugged in an entertainment cube and seen a reenactment of that strange event of his exile years, when he had indeed been swallowed by a sea dragon, after being shipwrecked off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and Lisamon Hultin, swallowed up in that same gulp, had cut a path to freedom through the monster’s blubber-walled gut. Even a child knew better than to take a dream at its most literal autobiographical level.

But nothing yielded itself to him on the deeper level, either, except an interpretation so obvious as to be trivial: that these movements of sea-dragon herds he had lately observed were yet another warning that the world was in danger, that some potent force threatened the stability of society. That much he knew already, and it needed no reinforcement. Why sea dragons, though? What metaphor was churning in his mind that had transformed those vast marine mammals into a world-swallowing menace?

Carabella said, “Perhaps you look too hard. Let it pass, and the meaning will come to you when your mind is turned to something else. What do you say? Shall we go on deck?”

They saw no more herds of dragons in the days that followed, only a few solitary stragglers, and then none at all, nor were Valentine’s dreams invaded again by threatening images. The sea was calm, the sky was bright and fair, the wind stood them well from the east. Valentine spent much of his time alone on the foredeck, looking off to sea; and at last came the day when out of the emptiness there suddenly came into view, like a bright white shield springing out of the dark horizon, the dazzling chalk cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, the holiest and most peaceful place of Majipoor, the sanctuary of the compassionate Lady.

7

The estate was virtually deserted now. All of Etowan Elacca’s field hands were gone, and most of the house staff. Not one of them had bothered to make a formal leavetaking, even for the sake of collecting the pay he owed them: they simply slipped stealthily away, as though they dreaded remaining in the blighted zone a single hour more, and feared that he would somehow find a way to compel them to stay if he knew they wished to leave.

Simoost, the Ghayrog foreman, was still loyal, as was his wife Xhama, Etowan Elacca’s head cook. Two or three of the housekeepers had stayed, and a couple of the gardeners. Etowan Elacca did not greatly mind that the rest had fled— there was, after all, no work for most of them to do any longer, nor could he afford to pay them properly, with no crop going to market. And sooner or later it would have become a problem simply to feed them all, if what he had heard about a growing food shortage in the entire province was true. Nevertheless, he took their departures as a rebuke. He was their master; he was responsible for their welfare; he was willing to provide for them as long as his resources lasted. Why were they so eager to go? What hope did they have, these farm workers and gardeners, of finding work in the ranching center of Falkynkip, which was where he assumed they had gone? And it was odd to see the place so quiet, where once there had been such bustling activity all through the day. Etowan Elacca often felt like a king whose subjects had renounced their citizenship and gone to some other land, leaving him to prowl an empty palace and issue orders to the unheeding air.

Yet he attempted to live as he had always lived. Certain habits remain unbroken even in the most dire time of calamity.

In the days before the falling of the purple rain, Etowan Elacca had risen each morning well ahead of the sun, and at the dawn hour went out into the garden to make his little tour of inspection. He took always the same route, through the alabandina grove to the tanigales, then a left turn into the shady little nook where the caramangs clustered, and onward under the fountaining profusion of the thagimole tree, which from its short stubby trunk sent graceful branches perpetually laden with fragrant blue-green flowers arching upward sixty feet or more. Then he saluted the mouthplants, he nodded to the glistening bladdertrees, he paused to hear the song of the singing ferns; and eventually he would come to the border of brilliant yellow mangahone bushes that marked the boundary between the garden and the farm, and he would look up the slight slope toward the plantings of stajja and glein and hingamorts and niyk.

There was nothing at all left of the farm and very little of the garden, but Etowan Elacca maintained his morning rounds all the same, pausing by each dead and blackened plant just as if it still thrived and grew and was making ready to burst into bloom. He knew that it was an absurd and pathetic thing to do, that anyone who discovered him at it would surely say, “Ah, there is a poor crazed old man, whose grief has driven him mad.” Let them say it, Etowan Elacca thought. It had never mattered much to him what other people said about him, and it mattered even less now. Perhaps he had gone mad, though he did not think so. He meant to continue his morning strolls all the same; for what else was there to do?

During the first weeks after the lethal rain his gardeners had wanted to clear each plant away as it died, but he had ordered them to let everything be, because he hoped that many of them were merely injured, not dead, and would spring back after a time, as they threw off the effects of whatever poisonous substance the purple rain had brought. After a while it became apparent even to Etowan Elacca that most of them had perished, that there would be no new life arising from the roots. But by that time the gardeners had begun to disappear, and soon only a handful remained, barely enough to carry out the necessary maintenance in the sectors of the garden that survived, let alone to cut down and haul away the dead plants. He thought at first that he would handle that melancholy task himself, little by little as time permitted; but the scope of the project so overwhelmed him that he decided shortly to leave everything as it was, letting the ruined garden remain as a kind of funereal monument to its former beauty.

As he moved slowly through his garden at dawn one morning many months after the time of the purple rain, Etowan Elacca found a curious object jutting from the soil in the pinnina bed: the polished tooth of some large animal. It was five or six inches long and sharp as a dagger. He plucked it out, stared at it puzzledly, and pocketed it. Farther on, among the muornas, he found two more teeth, of the same size, thrust into the ground at a distance of about ten feet from one another; and he looked up the slope toward the fields of dead stajja plants and saw three more, still farther apart. Beyond were another two, and then a single one, so that the whole group of teeth marked out a diamond-shaped pattern covering a large area of his land.

He returned quickly to the house, where Xhama was preparing the morning meal.

“Where is Simoost?” he asked.

The Ghayrog woman replied, without looking up, “He is in the niyk orchard, sir.”

“The niyks are long dead, Xhama.”

“Yes, sir. But he is in the niyk orchard. He has been there all night, sir.”

“Go to him. Tell him I want to see him.”

“He will not come, sir. And the food will burn if I leave.”

Etowan Elacca, astounded by her refusal, could not for the moment find words. Then, realizing that in this time of changes some new and bewildering further change must be in the process of occurring, he nodded curtly and turned without a word and went outside once more.

As quickly as he could he ascended the sloping terrain, past the dismal fields of stajja, a sea of yellowed shriveled shoots, and up through the stark leafless glein bushes and the dried pasty stuff that was all that was left of the hingamorts, until in time he entered the niyk orchard. The dead trees were so light that they were easily uprooted by strong winds, and most had fallen, with the others standing at precarious angles as though a giant had slapped them playfully with the back of his hand. At first Etowan Elacca did not see Simoost; and then he caught sight of the foreman wandering in a peculiarly haphazard way along the outer edge of the grove, threading a path between the leaning trees, pausing now and then to push one over. Was this the way he had spent the night? Since Ghayrogs did all their year’s sleeping in a few months of hibernation, it had never surprised Etowan Elacca to learn that Simoost had been at work during the night, but this sort of aimlessness was not at all like him.

“Simoost?”

“Ah, sir. Good morning, sir.”

“Xhama said you were up here. Are you all right, Simoost?”

“Yes, sir. I am very well, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very well, sir. Very well indeed.” But Simoost’s tone lacked conviction.

Etowan Elacca said, “Will you come down? I have something to show you.”

The Ghayrog appeared to be considering the request with care. Then he slowly descended until he reached the level where Etowan Elacca waited. The snaky coils of his hair, which were never entirely still, moved now in nervous jerky writhings, and from his powerful scaly body came a scent which Etowan Elacca, long familiar with the varying odors of Ghayrogs, knew to signify great distress and apprehension. Simoost had been with him for twenty years: Etowan Elacca had never before detected that scent coming from him.

“Sir?” Simoost said.

“What’s troubling you, Simoost?”

“Nothing, sir. I am very well, sir. You wished to show me something?”

“This,” said Etowan Elacca, taking from his pocket the long tapering tooth he had found in the pinnina bed. He held it forth and said, “I came upon this while I was making the garden tour half an hour ago. I wondered if you had any idea what it was.”

Simoost’s lidless green eyes flickered uneasily. “The tooth of a young sea dragon, sir. So I believe.”

“Is that what it is?”

“I am quite sure, sir. Were there others?”

“Quite a few. Eight more, I think.”

Simoost traced a diamond shape in the air. “Arranged in a pattern like this?”

“Yes,” said Etowan Elacca, frowning. “How did you know that?”

“It is the usual pattern. Ah, there is danger, sir, great danger!”

In exasperation Etowan Elacca said, “You’re being deliberately mysterious, aren’t you? What usual pattern? Danger from whom? By the Lady, Simoost, tell me in plain words what you know about all this!”

The Ghayrog’s odor grew more pungent: it spoke of intense dismay, fear, embarrassment. Simoost appeared to struggle for words. At length he said, “Sir, do you know where everyone who used to work for you has gone?”

“To Falkynkip, I assume, to look for work on the ranches. But what does that—”

“No, not to Falkynkip, sir. Farther west. Pidruid is where they have gone. To wait for the coming of the dragons.”

“What?”

“As in the revelation, sir.”

“Simoost—!”

“You know nothing about the revelation, then?”

Etowan Elacca felt a surge of anger such as he had rarely known in his tranquil and well-fulfilled life. “I know nothing whatever about the revelation, no,” he said with barely controllable fury.

“I will tell you, sir. I will tell you everything.”

The Ghayrog was silent an instant, as though arranging his thoughts with some precision.

Then he took a deep breath and said, “There is an old belief, sir, that at a certain time great trouble will come upon the world, and all Majipoor will be thrust into confusion. And at that time, so it is said, the sea dragons will leave the sea, they will go forth onto the land and proclaim a new kingdom, and they will work an immense transformation in our world. And that time will be known as the time of the revelation.”

“Whose fantasy is this?”

“Yes, fantasy is a good word for it, sir. Or fable, or, if you like, fairy-tale. It is not scientific. We understand that the sea-dragons are unable to emerge from the water. But the belief is quite widespread among some people, and they take much comfort from it.”

“Which ones are those?”

“The poor people, chiefly. Mainly the Liimen, though some of the other races subscribe to it also, sir. I have heard it is prevalent among some Hjorts, and certain Skandars. It is not widely known among humans, and particularly not by such gentry as you, sir. But I tell you there are many now who say that the time of the revelation has come, that the blight upon the land and the shortage of food is the first sign of it, that the Coronal and Pontifex will soon be swept away and the reign of the water-kings will begin. And those who believe such a thing, sir, are going now toward the cities of the coast, toward Pidruid and Narabal and Til-omon, so that they can see the water-kings come ashore and be among the first to worship them. I know this to be the truth, sir. It is happening all through the province, and for all I know, it is happening everywhere in the world. Millions have begun to march toward the sea.”

“How astonishing,” said Etowan Elacca. “How ignorant I am, here in my little world within the world!” He ran his finger down the length of the dragon-tooth, to the sharp tip, and pressed it tightly until he felt the pain. “And these? What do they signify?”

“As I understand it, sir, they place them here and there, as signs of the revelation and as trail markers showing the route to the coast. A few scouts move ahead of the great multitude of pilgrims heading west, and place the teeth, and soon afterward the others follow in their path.”

“How do they know where the teeth have been placed?”

“They know, sir. I do not know how they know. Perhaps the knowledge comes in dreams. Perhaps the water-kings issue sendings, like those of the Lady and of the King of Dreams.”

“So we will shortly be overrun by a horde of wanderers?”

“I think so, sir.”

Etowan Elacca tapped the tooth against the palm of his hand. “Simoost, why have you spent the night in the niyk orchard?”

“Trying to find the courage to tell you these things, sir.”

“Why did it require courage?”

“Because I think we must flee, sir, and I know you will not want to flee, and I do not wish to abandon you, but I do not wish to die, either. And I think we will die if we stay here longer.”

“You knew about the dragon-teeth in the garden?”

“I saw them placed, sir. I spoke with the scouts.”

“Ah. When?”

“At midnight, sir. There were three of them, two Liimen and a Hjort. They say that four hundred thousand people are heading this way out of the eastern Rift country.”

“Four hundred thousand people will march across my land?”

“I think so, sir.”

“There won’t be anything left once they’ve passed through, will there? They’ll come through like a plague of locusts. They’ll clean out such food supplies as we have, and I imagine they’ll plunder the house, and they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way, so I would suppose. Not out of malice, but merely in the general hysteria. Is that how you see it also, Simoost?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when will they be here?”

“Two days, perhaps three, so they told me.”

“Then you and Xhama should leave this morning, should you not? All the staff should go right away. To Falkynkip, I would say. You ought to be able to reach Falkynkip before the mob gets there, and then you should be safe.”

“You will not leave, sir?”

“No.”

“Sir, I beg you—”

“No, Simoost.”

“You will surely perish!”

“I have perished already, Simoost. Why should I flee to Falkynkip? What would I do there? I have perished already, Simoost, can’t you perceive that? I am my own ghost.”

“Sir—sir—”

“There’s no more time to waste,” said Etowan Elacca. “You should have taken your wife and gone at midnight, when you saw the teeth being placed. Go. Go. Now.”

He swung about and descended the slope, and as he passed back through the garden he replaced the dragon-tooth where he had found it, in the pinnina bed.

In midmorning the Ghayrog and his wife came to him and implored him to leave with them—they were as close to tears as Etowan Elacca had ever seen a Ghayrog come, for Ghayrog eyes have no tear ducts—but he stood firm, and in the end they departed without him. He called the others who had remained loyal together, and dismissed them, giving them such money as he happened to have on hand, and much of the food from the larder.

That night he prepared his own dinner for the first time in his life. He thought he showed respectable skill, for a novice. He opened the last of the fireshower wine, and drank rather more than he would normally have allowed himself. What was happening to the world was very strange to him, and difficult to accept, but the wine made it a little easier. How many thousands of years of peace there had been! What a pleasant world, what a smoothly functioning world! Pontifex and Coronal, Pontifex and Coronal, a serene progression moving from Castle Mount to the Labyrinth, governing always with the consent of the many for the benefit of all; though of course some benefited more than others, yet no one went hungry, no one lived in need. And now it was ending. Poisonous rain comes from the sky, gardens wither, crops are destroyed, famines begin, new religions take hold, ravenous crazy mobs swarm toward the sea. Does the Coronal know? Does the Lady of the Isle? The King of Dreams? What is being done to repair these things? What can be done? Will kindly dreams from the Lady help to fill empty bellies? Will threatening dreams from the King turn the mobs back? Will the Pontifex, if indeed there is a Pontifex, come forth from the Labyrinth and make lofty proclamations? Will the Coronal ride from province to province, urging patience? No. No. No. No. It is over, Etowan Elacca thought. What a pity that this could not have waited another twenty years, or thirty perhaps, so that I could have died quietly in my garden, and the garden still in bloom.

He kept watch through the night, and all was still.

In the morning he imagined he could hear the first rumblings of the oncoming horde to the east. He went through the house, opening every door that was locked, so they would do as little damage as possible to the building as they ransacked it for his food and his wines. It was a beautiful house, and he loved it and hoped it would come to no harm.

Then he went out into the garden, among the shriveled and blackened plants. Much of it, he realized, had actually survived the deadly rain: rather more than he thought, since he had had eyes all these dark months only for the destruction, but indeed the mouthplants were still flourishing and the nightflower trees and some of the androdragmas, the dwikkas, the sihornish vines, even the fragile bladdertrees. For hours he walked among them. He thought of giving himself to one of the mouthplants, but that would be an ugly death, he thought, slow and bloody and inelegant, and he wanted it said of him, even if there might be no one to say it, that he had been elegant to the last. Instead he went to the sihornish vines, which were festooned with unripened fruits, still yellow. The ripe sihornish was one of the finest of delicacies, but the fruit when yellow brims with deadly alkaloids. For a long while Etowan Elacca stood by the vine, utterly without fear, simply not yet quite ready. Then came the sound of voices, not imagined this time, the harsh voices of city folk, many of them, borne on the fragrant air from the east. Now he was ready. He knew it would be more gentlemanly to wait until they were here, and bid them be welcome to his estate, and offer them his best wines and such dinner as he could provide; but without his staff he could not provide much in the way of hospitality, after all; and, besides, he had never really liked city folk, particularly when they came as uninvited guests. He looked about one last time at the dwikkas and the bladdertrees and the one sickly halatinga that somehow had survived, and commended his soul to the Lady, and felt the beginnings of tears. He did not think weeping was seemly. And so he put the yellow sihornish to his lips, and bit eagerly into its hard unripe flesh.

8

Though she had merely intended to rest her eyes a moment or two before she began preparing dinner, a deep and powerful sleep came quickly over Elsinome when she lay down, drawing her into a cloudy realm of yellow shadows and rubbery pink hills; and though she had scarcely expected a sending to come to her during a casual before-dinner nap, she felt a gentle pressure at the gateways of her soul as she descended into the fullness of her slumber, and knew it to be the presence of the Lady coming upon her.

Elsinome was tired all the time, lately. She had never worked so hard as in the last few days, since news of the crisis in western Zimroel had reached the Labyrinth. Now the cafe was full all day long with tense officials of the Pontificate, exchanging the latest information over a few bowls of fine Muldemar or good golden Dulornese wine—they wanted only the best, when they were this worried. And so she was constantly running back and forth, juggling her inventories, calling in extra supplies from the wine merchants. It had been exciting, in a way, at first: she felt almost as though she were participating herself in this critical moment of history. But now it was merely exhausting.

Her last thought before falling asleep was of Hissune: Prince Hissune, as she was still trying to learn to regard him. She had not heard from him in months, not since that astonishing letter, so dreamlike itself, telling her that they had called him to the highest circle of the Castle. He had begun to seem unreal to her after that, no longer the small sharp-eyed clever boy who once had amused and comforted and supported her, but a stranger in fine robes who spent his days among the councils of the great, holding unimaginable discourse on the ultimate destinies of the world. An image came to her of Hissune at a vast table polished to mirror brightness, sitting among older men whose features were unclearly limned but from whom there radiated great presence and authority, and they were all looking toward Hissune as he spoke. Then the scene vanished and she saw yellow clouds and pink hills, and the Lady entered her mind.

It was the briefest of sendings. She was on the Isle—that much she knew from the white cliffs and the steeply rising terraces, though she had never actually been there, never in fact been outside the Labyrinth—and in a dreamlike drifting way she was moving through a garden that was at first immaculate and airy and then imperceptibly became dark and overgrown. The Lady was by her side, a black-haired woman in white robes who seemed sad and weary, not at all the strong, warm, comforting person Elsinome had met in earlier sendings: she was bowed with care, her eyes were hooded and downcast, her movements uncertain. “Give me your strength,” the Lady murmured. This is all wrong, thought Elsinome. The Lady comes to us to offer strength, not to receive it. But the dream-Elsinome did not hesitate. She was vigorous and tall, with a nimbus of light flickering about her head and shoulders. She drew the Lady to her, and took her against her breast and held her in a close strong embrace, and the Lady sighed and it seemed that some of the pain went from her. Then the two women drew apart and the Lady, glowing now as Elsinome was, touched her fingers to her lips and threw a kiss to Elsinome, and vanished.

That was all. With startling suddenness Elsinome woke and saw the familiar dreary walls of her flat in Guadeloom Court. The afterglow of a sending was on her beyond any doubt, but the sendings of other years had left her always with a strong sense of new purpose, of directions redirected, and this one had brought only mystification. She could not understand the purpose of such a sending; but perhaps it would manifest itself to her, she thought, in a day or two.

She heard sounds in her daughters’ room.

“Ailimoor? Maraune?”

Neither girl answered. Elsinome peered in and saw them huddling close over some small object, which Maraune put quickly behind her back.

“What’s that you have there?”

“It’s nothing, mother. Just a little thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“A trinket. Sort of.”

Something in Maraune’s tone made Elsinome suspicious. “Let me see it.”

“It really isn’t anything.”

“Let me see.”

Maraune shot a quick look toward her older sister. Ailimoor, looking uneasy and awkward, simply shrugged.

“It’s personal, mother. Doesn’t a girl get to have any privacy?” Maraune said.

Elsinome held out her hand. Sighing, Maraune brought forth and reluctantly surrendered a small sea-dragon tooth, finely carved over much of its surface with unfamiliar and peculiarly disturbing symbols of an odd, narrow-angled sort. Elsinome, still in part enveloped in the strange aura of the sending, found the little amulet sinister and menacing.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Everyone’s got them, mother.”

“I asked you where it came from.”

“Vanimoon. Actually Vanimoon’s sister Shulaire. But she got it from him. Can I please have it back?”

“Do you know what this thing means?” Elsinome asked.

“Means?”

“That’s what I said. What it means.”

Shrugging, Maraune said, “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a trinket. I’m going to drill a hole in it and wear it on a string.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

Maraune was silent. Ailimoor said, “Mother, I—” She faltered.

“Go on.”

“It’s just a fad, mother. Everyone’s got them. There’s some crazy new Liiman idea going around that the sea dragons are gods, that they’re going to take over the world, that all the trouble that’s been happening lately is a sign of what’s to come. And people say that if we carry the sea-dragon teeth, we’ll be saved when the dragons come ashore.”

Coldly Elsinome said, “There’s nothing new about it. Nonsense like that has been going around for hundreds of years. But always hidden, always in whispers, because it’s crazy and dangerous and sick. Sea dragons are oversized fish and nothing more. The One who looks over us is the Divine, protecting us through the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady. Do you understand? Do you understand?”

She snapped the tapering tooth in half with a quick angry motion and tossed the pieces to Maraune, who glared at her with a fury that Elsinome had never seen in the eyes of one of her daughters before. Hastily she turned away, toward the kitchen. Her hands were shaking, and she felt chilled; and if the peace of the Lady had descended upon her at all in the sending—that sending which now seemed to have come to her weeks ago—it was entirely gone from her now.

9

The entry to Numinor harbor took all the skill the most skillful pilot could muster, for the channel was narrow and the currents were swift, and sandy reefs sometimes were born overnight in the volatile underbeds. But Pandelume was a calm and confident figure on the wheel deck, giving her signals with clear decisive gestures, and the royal flagship came in jauntily, past the neck of, the channel and into the broad sweet safe anchorage, the only possible one on the Alhanroel side of the Isle of Sleep, the one place where a breach existed in the tremendous chalk wall of First Cliff.

“I can feel my mother’s presence from here,” said Valentine as they made ready to go ashore. “She comes to me like the fragrance of alabandina blossoms on the wind.”

“Will the Lady be here to greet us today?” Carabella asked.

“I much doubt it,” Valentine said. “Custom calls for son to go to mother, not mother to son. She’ll remain at Inner Temple, and send her hierarchs, I suppose, to fetch us.”

A group of hierarchs indeed was waiting when the royal party disembarked. Among these women, in golden robes trimmed with red, was one already well known to Valentine, the austere white-haired Lorivade, who had accompanied him during the war of restoration on his journey from the Isle to Castle Mount, training him in the techniques of trance and mental projection that were practiced on the Isle. A second figure in the group seemed familiar to Valentine but he could not place her until the very instant when she spoke her name: and simultaneous with that came the flash of recognition, that this was Talinot Esulde, the slender, enigmatic person who had been his first guide on his pilgrimage to the Isle long ago. Then she had had a shaven skull, and Valentine had been unable to guess her sex, suspecting her to be male from her height or female from the delicacy of her features and the lightness of her frame; but since her advancement to the inner hierarchy she had allowed her hair to grow, and those long silken locks, as golden as Valentine’s own but far finer of texture, left no doubt that she was a woman.

“We carry dispatches for you, my lord,” said the hierarch Lorivade. “There is much news, and none of it good, I fear. But first we should conduct you to the royal lodging-place.”

There was a house in Numinor port known as the Seven Walls, which was a name that no one understood, because it was so ancient that its origins had been forgotten. It stood on the rampart of the city overlooking the sea, with its face toward Alhanroel and its back to the steep triple tiers of the Isle, and it was built of massive blocks of dark granite hewn from the quarries of the Stoienzar Peninsula, fitted together in a perfect joining with no trace of mortar. Its sole function was to serve as a place of refreshment for a visiting Coronal newly arrived on the Isle, and so it went unused for years at a time; yet it was scrupulously maintained by a large staff, as though a Coronal might arrive without warning at any moment and must needs have his house in order at the hour of his landing.

It was very old, as old as the Castle itself, and older, so far as archaeologists could determine, than any of the temples and holy terraces now in existence elsewhere on the Isle. According to legend it had been built for the reception of Lord Stiamot by his mother, the fabled Lady Thiin, upon his visit to the Isle of Sleep at the conclusion of the Metamorph wars of eight thousand years ago. Some said that the name Seven Walls was a reference to the entombing in the foundations of the building, as it was being constructed, of the bodies of seven Shapeshifter warriors slain by Lady Thiin’s own hand during the defense of the Isle against Metamorph invasion. But no such remains had ever come to light in the periodic reconstructions of the old building, and also it was thought unlikely by most modern historians that Lady Thiin, heroic woman that she was, had actually wielded weapons herself in the Battle of the Isle. By another tradition, a seven-sided chapel erected by Lord Stiamot in honor of his mother once had stood in the central courtyard, giving its name to the entire structure. That chapel, so the story went, had been dismantled on the day of Lord Stiamot’s death and shipped to Alaisor to become the pediment of his tomb. But that too was unproven, for no trace of an early seven-sided structure could be detected in the courtyard now, and there was little likelihood that anyone today would excavate Lord Stiamot’s tomb to see what could be learned from its paving-blocks. Valentine himself preferred a different version of the origin of the name, which held that Seven Walls was merely a corruption into the Majipoori tongue of certain ancient Metamorph words that meant “The place where the fish scales are scraped off,” and referred to the prehistoric use of the shore of the Isle by Shapeshifter fishermen sailing from Alhanroel. But it was unlikely that the truth would ever be determined.

There were rituals of arrival that a Coronal was supposed to perform upon reaching the Seven Walls, by way of aiding his transition from the world of action that was his usual sphere to the world of the spirit in which the Lady was supreme. While Valentine carried these things out—a matter of ceremonial bathing, of the burning of aromatic herbs, of meditation in a private chamber whose walls were airy damasks of pierced marble—he left Carabella to read through the dispatches that had accumulated for him during the weeks he was at sea; and when he returned, cleansed and calm, he saw at once from the stark expression of her eyes that he had gone about his rituals too soon, that he would be drawn back instantly into the realm of events.

“How bad is the news?” he asked.

“It could scarcely be worse, my lord.”

She handed him the sheaf of documents, which she had winnowed so that the uppermost sheets gave him the gist of the most important documents. Failure of crops in seven provinces—severe shortage of food in many parts of Zimroel— the beginnings of a mass migration out of the heartland of the continent toward the western coastal cities—sudden prominence of a formerly obscure religious cult, apocalyptic and millennial in nature, centering around the belief that sea dragons were supernatural beings that would soon come ashore to announce the birth of a new epoch—

He looked up, aghast.

“All this in so short a time?”

“And these are only fragmentary reports, Valentine. No one really knows what’s going on out there right now—the distances are so vast, the communications channels so disturbed—”

His hand sought hers. “Everything foretold in my dreams and visions is coming to pass. The darkness is coming, Carabella, and I am all that stands in its path.”

“There are some who stand beside you, love.”

“That I know. And for that am I grateful. But at the last moment I will be alone, and then what will I do?” He smiled ruefully. “There was a time when we were juggling at the Perpetual Circus in Dulorn, do you recall, and the knowledge of my true identity was only then beginning to break through to my awareness. And I was speaking with Deliamber, and telling him that perhaps it was the will of the Divine that I had been overthrown, and that perhaps it was just as well for Majipoor that the usurper keep my name and my throne, for I had no real desire to be king and the other might indeed prove to be a capable ruler. Which Deliamber denied completely, and said there could be only one lawfully consecrated king and I was that one, and must return to my place. You ask a great deal of me, I said. ‘History asks a great deal,’ he replied. ‘History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason.’ And also: ‘It matters, my lord, it matters very much,’ said he, ‘who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal.’ I have never forgotten those words of his, and I never will.”

“And how did you answer him?”

“I answered ‘yes’ and then I added ‘perhaps,’ and he said, ‘You’ll go on wavering from yes to perhaps a long while, but yes will govern in the end.’ And so it did, and therefore I recaptured my throne—and nevertheless we move farther every day from order and creation and reason, and closer to anarchy, destruction, unreason.” Valentine stared at her in anguish. “Was Deliamber wrong, then? Does it matter who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal? I think I am a good man, and sometimes I think even that I am a wise ruler; and yet even so the world falls apart, Carabella, despite my best efforts or because of them, I know not which. It might have been better for everyone if I had stayed a wandering juggler.”

“Oh, Valentine, what foolish talk this is!”

“Is it?”

“Are you saying that if you’d left Dominin Barjazid to rule, there would have been a fine lusavender harvest this year? How are you to blame for crop failures in Zimroel? These are natural calamities, with natural causes, and you’ll find a wise way to deal with them, because wisdom is your way, and you are the chosen of the Divine.”

“I am chosen of the princes of Castle Mount,” he said. “They are human and fallible.”

“The Divine speaks through them when a Coronal is chosen. And the Divine did not mean you to be the instrument of Majipoor’s destruction. These reports are serious but not terrifying. You will speak with your mother in a few days, and she’ll fortify you where weariness makes you weaken; and then we’ll proceed on to Zimroel and you will set all to rights.”

“So I hope, Carabella. But—”

“So you know, Valentine! I say once more, my lord, I hardly recognize in you the man I know, when you speak this gloomy way.” She tapped the sheaf of dispatches. “I would not minimize these things. But I think there is much we can do to turn back the darkness, and that it will be done.”

He nodded slowly. “So I think myself, much of the time. But at other times—”

“At other times it’s best not to think at all.” A knock sounded at the door. “Good,” she said. “We are interrupted, and I give thanks for that, for I tire of hearing you make all these downcast noises, my love.”

She admitted Talinot Esulde to the room. The hierarch said, “My lord, your mother the Lady has arrived, and wishes to see you in the Emerald Room.”

“My mother here? But I expected to go to her tomorrow, at Inner Temple!”

“She has come to you,” said Talinot Esulde imperturbably.

The Emerald Room was a study in green: walls of green serpentine, floors of green onyx, translucent panes of green jade in place of windows. The Lady stood in the center of the room, between the two huge potted tanigales, covered with dazzling blossoms of metallic green, that were virtually all that the chamber contained. Valentine went quickly toward her. She stretched her hands to him, and as their fingertips met he felt the familiar throbbing of the current that radiated from her, the sacred force that, like spring water draining into a well, had accumulated in her through all her years of intimate contact with the billions of souls of Majipoor.

He had spoken with her in dreams many times, but he had not seen her in years, and he was unprepared for the changes time had worked upon her. She was still beautiful: the passing of the years could not affect that. But age now had cast the faintest of veils over her, and the sheen was gone from her black hair, the warmth of her gaze was ever so slightly diminished, her skin seemed somehow to have loosened its grasp on her flesh. Yet she carried herself as splendidly as ever, and she was, as always, magnificently robed in white, with a flower behind one ear, and the silver circlet of her power on her brow: a figure of grace and majesty, of force and of infinite compassion.

“Mother. At last.”

“Such a long while, Valentine! So many years!”

She touched his face gently, his shoulders, his arms. The brush of her fingers over him was feather-light, but it left him tingling, so great was the power within this woman. He had to remind himself that she was no goddess, but only mortal flesh and daughter of mortal flesh, that upon a time long ago she had been wife to the High Counsellor Damiandane, that two sons had sprung from her and he was one of them, that once he had nestled at her breast and listened happily to her soft song, that it was she who had wiped the mud from his cheeks when he came home from play, that in the tempests of childhood he had wept in her arms and drawn comfort and wisdom from her. Long ago, all that: it seemed almost to be in another life. When the sceptor of the Divine had descended upon the family of the High Counsellor Damiandane and raised Voriax to the Confalume Throne it had by the same stroke transformed the mother of Voriax into the Lady of the Isle, and neither one could ever again be regarded even within the family as merely mortal. Valentine found himself then and always after unable to think of her simply as his mother, for she had donned the silver circlet and had gone to the Isle, and dwelled there in majesty as Lady, and the comfort and wisdom that formerly she had dispensed to him she shared now with the entire world, who looked to her with reverence and need. Even when another stroke of that same scepter had elevated Valentine to Voriax’s place, and he too passed in some way beyond the realm of the ordinary and became larger than life, virtually a figure of myth, he had retained his awe of her, for he had no awe of himself, Coronal or no, and could not through his own inner vision see himself with the awe that others held for him, or he for this Lady.

Yet they talked of family things before they turned to higher questions. He told her such details as he knew of the doings of her sister Galiara and her brother Sait of Stee, and of Divvis and Mirigant and the daughters of Voriax. She asked him whether he returned often to the old family lands at Halanx, and if he found the Castle a happy place, and whether he and Carabella were still so loving and close. The tensions within him eased, and he felt almost as though he were a real person, some minor lordling of the Mount, visiting amiably with his mother, who had settled in a different clime but still was avid for news of home. But it was impossible to escape the truths of their position for long, and when the conversation began to grow forced and strained he said, in somewhat another tone, “You should have let me come to you in the proper way, mother. This is not right, the Lady descending from Inner Temple to visit the Seven Walls.”

“Such formality is unwise now. Events crowd us: the actions must be taken.”

“Then you’ve had the news from Zimroel?”

“Of course.” She touched her circlet. “This brings me news from everywhere, with the swiftness of the speed of thought. Oh, Valentine, such an unhappy time for our reunion! I had imagined that when you made your processional you would come here in joy, and now you are here and I feel only pain in you, and doubt, and fear of what is to come.”

“What do you see, mother? What is to come?”

“Do you think I have some way of knowing the future?”

“You see the present with great clarity. As you say, you receive news from everywhere.”

“What I see is dark and clouded. Things stir in the world that are beyond my understanding. Once again the order of society is threatened. And the Coronal is in despair. That is what I see. Why do you despair, Valentine? Why is there so much fear in you? You are the son of Damiandane and the brother of Voriax, and they were not men who knew despair, and despair is not native to my soul either, or to yours, so I thought.”

“There is great trouble in the world, as I have learned since my arrival here, and that trouble increases.”

“And is that cause for despair? It should only increase your desire to set things right, as once you did before.”

“For the second time, though, I see Majipoor overtaken by calamity during my reign. What I see,” said Valentine, “is that my reign has been an unlucky one, and will be unluckier yet, if these plagues and famines and panicky migrations grow more severe. I fear that some curse lies on me.”

He saw anger briefly flare in her eyes, and he was reminded again of the formidable strength of her soul, of the icy discipline and devotion to duty that lay below her warm and gentle appearance. In her way she was as fierce a warrior as the famed Lady Thiin of ancient times, who had gone out upon the barricades to drive back the invading Metamorphs. This Lady too might be capable of such valor, if there were need. She had no tolerance, he knew, for weakness in her sons, or self-pity, or despondency, because she had none for those things in herself. And, remembering that, he felt some of the bleakness of his mood begin to go from him.

She said tenderly, “You take blame on yourself without proper cause. If a curse hangs over this world, and I think that that is the case, it lies not on the noble and virtuous Coronal, but upon us all. You have no reason for guilt: you least of all, Valentine. You are not the bearer of the curse, but rather the one who is most capable of lifting it from us. But to do that you must act, and act quickly.”

“And what curse is this, then?”

Putting her hand to her brow, she said, “You have a silver circlet that is the mate to mine. Did you carry it with you on this journey?”

“It goes everywhere with me.”

“Fetch it here, then.”

Valentine went from the room and spoke with Sleet, who waited outside; and shortly an attendant came, bearing the jeweled case in which the circlet resided. The Lady had given it to him when first he went to the Isle as a pilgrim, during his years of exile. Through it, in communion with his mother’s mind, he had received the final confirmation that the simple juggler of Pidruid and Lord Valentine of Majipoor were one and the same person, for with its aid and hers his lost memories had come flooding back. And afterward the hierarch Lorivade had taught him how, by virtue of the circlet, he could enter the trance by which he might have access to the minds of others. He had used it little since his restoration to the throne, for the circlet was an adjunct of the Lady, not of the Coronal, and it was unfitting for one Power of Majipoor to transgress on the domain of another. Now he donned the fine metal band again, while the Lady poured for him, as she had done long ago on this Isle, a flask of the dark, sweet, spicy dream-wine that was used in the opening of mind to mind.

He drank it off in a single draught, and she drank down a flask of her own, and they waited a moment for the wine to take effect. He put himself into the state of trance that gave him the fullest receptivity. Then she took his hands and slipped her fingers tightly between his to complete the contact, and into his mind came such a rush of images and sensations as to daze and stun him, though he had known what sort of impact there would be.

This now was what the Lady had for many years experienced each day as she and her acolytes sent their spirits roving through the world to those in need of aid.

He saw no individual minds: the world was far too huge and crowded to permit precision of that sort except with the most strenuous of concentration. What he detected, as he soared like a gust of hot wind riding the thermal waves of the sky, were pockets of sensation: apprehension here, fear, shame, guilt, a sudden sharp stabbing zone of madness, a gray sprawling blanket of despair. He dipped low and saw the textures of souls, the black ridges shot through with ribbons of scarlet, the harsh jagged spikes, the roiling turbulent roadways of bristling tight-woven fabric. He soared high into tranquil realms of nonbeing; he swooped across dismal deserts that emanated a numbing throb of isolation; he whirled over glittering snowfields of the spirit, and meadows whose every blade of glass glistened with an unbearable beauty. And he saw the places of blight, and the places of hunger, and the places where chaos was king. And he felt terrors rising like hot dry winds from the great cities; and he felt some force beating in the seas like an irresistible booming drum; and he felt a powerful sense of gathering menace, of oncoming disaster. An intolerable weight had fallen upon the world, Valentine saw, and was crushing it by slow increments of intensity, like a gradually closing fist.

Through all of this his guide was the blessed Lady his mother, without whom he might well have sizzled and charred in the intensity of the passion that radiated from the well of the world-mind. But she stayed at his side, lifting him easily through the darker places, and carrying him on toward the threshold of understanding, which loomed before him the way the immense Dekkeret Gate of Normork, that greatest of gates, which is closed only at times when the world is in peril, looms and dwarfs all those who approach it. But when he came to that threshold he was alone, and he passed through unaided.

On the far side there was only music, music made visible, a tremulous quavering tone that stretched across the abyss like the weakest of woven bridges, and he stepped out upon that bridge and saw the splashes of bright sound that stained the flow of substance below, and the dagger-keen spurts of rhythmic pulsation overhead, and the line of infinitely regressing red and purple and green arcs that sang to him from the horizon. Then all of these gave way to a single formidable sound, of a weight beyond any bearing, a black juggernaut of sound that embraced all tones into itself, and rolled forward upon the universe and pressed upon it mercilessly. And Valentine understood.

He opened his eyes. The Lady his mother stood calmly between the potted tanigales, watching him, smiling as she might have smiled down on him when he was a sleeping babe. She took the circlet from his brow and returned it to the jeweled case.

“You saw?” she asked.

“It is as I have long believed,” said Valentine. “What is happening in Zimroel is no random event. There is a curse, yes, and it is on us all, and has been for thousands of years. My Vroon wizard Deliamber said to me once that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account, he said, accumulates interest. And now the note is being presented for collection. What has begun is our punishment, our humbling, the settling of the reckoning.”

“So it is,” said the Lady.

“Was what we saw the Divine Itself, mother? Holding the world in a tight grasp, and making the grasp tighter? And that sound I heard, of such terrible weight: was that the Divine also?”

“The images you saw were your own, Valentine. I saw other things. Nor can the Divine be reduced to anything so concrete as an image. But I think you saw the essence of the matter, yes.”

“I saw that the grace of the Divine has been withdrawn from us.”

“Yes. But not irredeemably.”

“Are you sure it isn’t already too late?”

“I am sure of it, Valentine.”

He was silent a moment. Then he said, “So be it. I see what must be done, and I will do it. How appropriate that I should have come to the understanding of these things in the Seven Walls, which the Lady Thiin built to honor her son after he had crushed the Metamorphs! Ah, mother, mother, will you build a building like this for me, when I succeed in undoing Lord Stiamot’s work?”

10

“Again,” Hissune said, swinging about to face Alsimir and the other knight-initiate. “Come at me again. Both of you at once this time.”

“Both?” said Alsimir.

“Both. And if I catch you going easy on me, I promise you I’ll have you assigned to sweep the stables for a month.”

“How can you withstand us both, Hissune?”

“I don’t know that I can. That’s what I need to learn. Come at me, and we’ll see.”

He was slick with sweat and his heart was hammering, but his body felt loose and well tuned. He came here, to the cavernous gymnasium in the Castle’s east wing, for at least an hour every day, no matter how pressing his other responsibilities.

It was essential, Hissune believed, that he strengthen and develop his body, build up his physical endurance, increase his already considerable agility. Otherwise, so it plainly seemed, he would be under a heavy handicap pursuing his ambitions here. The princes of Castle Mount tended to be athletes and to make a cult of athleticism, constantly testing themselves: riding, jousting, racing, wrestling, hunting, all those ancient simpleminded pastimes that Hissune, in his Labyrinth days, had never had the opportunity or the inclination to pursue. Now Lord Valentine had thrust him among these burly, energetic men, and he knew he must meet them on their own ground if he meant to win a lasting place in their company.

Of course there was no way he could transform his slight, slender frame into something to equal the robust muscularity of a Stasilaine, an Elidath, a Divvis. They were big men, and he would never be that. But he could excel in his own way. This game of baton, for example: a year ago he had not even heard of it, and now, after many hours of practice, he was coming close to mastery. It called for quickness of eye and foot, not for overwhelming physical power, and so in a sense it served as a metaphor for his entire approach to the problem of life.

“Ready,” he called.

He stood in a balanced partial crouch, alert, pliant, with his arms partly extended and his baton, a light, slender wand of nightflower wood with a cup-shaped hilt of basketwork at one end, resting across them. His eyes flickered from one opponent to the other. They both were taller than he was, Alsimir by two or three inches, and his friend Stimion even more. But he was quicker. Neither of them had come close to putting a baton on him all morning. Two at once, though—that might be a different matter—

“Challenge!” Alsimir called. “Post! Entry!”

They came toward him, and as they moved in they raised their batons into attack position.

Hissune drew a deep breath and concentrated on constructing a spherical zone of defense about himself, impermeable, impenetrable, a volume of space enclosed in armor. It was purely imaginary, but that made no difference. Thani, his baton-master, had shown him that: maintain your defensive zone as though it is a wall of steel, and nothing would get through it. The secret lay in the intensity of your concentration.

Alsimir reached him a fraction of a second ahead of Stimion, as Hissune had expected. Alsimir’s baton went high, probed the northwest quadrant of Hissune’s defense, then feinted for a lower entry. As it neared the perimeter of Hissune’s defended area Hissune brought his baton up with a whip-like action of his wrist, parried Alsimir’s thrust solidly, and in the same motion—for he had already calculated it, though in no conscious way—he continued around to his right, meeting the thrust from Stimion that was coming in a shade late out of the northeast.

There was the whickering sound of wood sliding against wood as Hissune let his baton ride halfway up the length of Stimion’s; then he pivoted, leaving Stimion only empty space to plunge through as the force of his thrust carried him forward. All that took only a moment. Stimion, grunting in surprise, lurched through the place where Hissune had been. Hissune tapped him lightly on the back with his baton and swung around again on Alsimir. Up came Alsimir’s baton; inward came the second thrust. Hissune blocked it easily and answered with one of his own that Alsimir handled well, parrying so firmly that the shock of the impact went rattling up Hissune’s arm to the elbow. But Hissune recovered quickly, sidestepped Alsimir’s next attempt, and danced off to one side to elude Stimion’s baton.

Now they found themselves in a new configuration, Stimion and Alsimir standing to either side of Hissune rather than facing him. They surely would attempt simultaneous thrusts, Hissune thought. He could not allow that.

Thani had taught him: Time must always be your servant, never your master. If there is not enough time for you to make your move, divide each moment into smaller moments, and then you will have enough time for anything.

Yes. Nothing is truly simultaneous, Hissune knew.

As he had for many months been training himself to do, he shifted into the time-splitting mode of perception that Thani had instilled in him: viewing each second as the sum of ten tenths of itself, he allowed himself to dwell in each of those tenths in turn, the way one might dwell in each of ten caves on successive nights during the crossing of a desert. His perspective now was profoundly altered. He saw Stimion moving in jerky discontinuous bursts, struggling like some sort of crude automaton to bring his baton up and jab it toward him. With the greatest simplicity of effort Hissune slipped himself into the interval between two slices of a moment and knocked Stimion’s baton aside. The thrust from Alsimir was already on its way, but Hissune had ample time to withdraw himself from Alsimir’s reach, and as Alsimir’s arm came to full extension Hissune gave it a light touch with his own weapon, just above the elbow.

Returning now to the normal perception mode, Hissune confronted Stimion, who was coming round for another thrust. Instead of making ready to parry, Hissune chose to move forward, stepping inside the startled Stimion’s guard. From that position he brought his baton upward, touching Alsimir again and swinging round to catch Stimion with the tip as he whirled in confusion.

“Touch and double touch,” Hissune called. “Match.”

“How did you do that?” asked Alsimir, tossing down his baton.

Hissune laughed. “I have no idea. But I wish Thani had been here to see it!” He dropped to a kneeling position and let sweat drip freely from his forehead onto the mats. It had been, he knew, an amazing display of skill. Never had he fought that well before. An accident, a moment of luck? Or had he truly reached a new level of accomplishment? He recalled Lord Valentine speaking of his juggling, which he had taken up in the most casual of ways, merely to earn a livelihood, when he was wandering lost and bewildered in Zimroel. Juggling, the Coronal had said, had shown him the key to the proper focusing of his mental abilities. Lord Valentine had gone so far as to suggest that he might not have been able to regain his throne, but for the disciplines of spirit that his mastery of juggling had imposed on him. Hissune knew he could hardly take up juggling himself—it would be too blatant a flattery of the Coronal, too open a gesture of imitation—but he was beginning to see that he might attain much of the same discipline through wielding the baton. Certainly his performance just now had carried him into extraordinary realms of perception and achievement. He wondered if he was capable of repeating it. He looked up and said, “Well, shall we go another, one on two?”

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Stimion said.

“Of course I do. But why stop just because you’re tired?”

He took his stance again, waiting for them. Another fifteen minutes of this, he thought. Then a swim, and then to the Pinitor Court to get some work done, and then—

“Well? Come at me,” he said.

Alsimir shook his head. “There’s no sense in it. You’re getting too good for us.”

“Come,” Hissune said again. “Ready!”

Somewhat reluctantly Alsimir moved into dueling position, and gestured Stimion to do the same. But as the three men stood poised, bringing their minds and bodies to the degree of balance the match required, a gymnasium attendant stepped out on the balcony above them and called Hissune’s name. A message for the prince, he said, from the Regent Elidath: Prince Hissune is asked to report at once to the Regent at the office of the Coronal.

“Another day, then?” Hissune said to Alsimir and Stimion.

He dressed quickly and made his way upward and through the intricate coils and tangles of the Castle, cutting across courtyards and avenues, past Lord Ossier’s parapet and its amazing view of Castle Mount’s vast slope, on beyond the Kinniken Observatory and the music room of Lord Prankipin and Lord Confalume’s garden-house and the dozens of other structures and outbuildings that clung like barnacles to the core of the Castle. At last he reached the central sector, where the offices of government were, and had himself admitted to the spacious suite in which the Coronal worked, now occupied during Lord Valentine’s prolonged absence by the High Counsellor Elidath.

He found the Regent pacing back and forth like a restless bear in front of the relief map of the world opposite Lord Valentine’s desk. Stasilaine was with him, seated at the council table. He looked grim, and acknowledged Hissune’s arrival only with the merest of nods. In an offhand, preoccupied way Elidath gestured to Hissune to take a seat beside him. A moment later Divvis arrived, formally dressed in eye-jewels and feather-mask, as though the summons had interrupted him on his way to a high state ceremony.

Hissune felt a great uneasiness growing in him. What reason could Elidath possibly have for calling a meeting like this so suddenly, in such an irregular way? And why just these few of us, out of all the princes? Elidath, Stasilaine, Divvis—surely those were the three prime candidates to succeed Lord Valentine, the innermost of the inner circle. Something major has happened, Hissune thought. The old Pontifex has died at last, perhaps. Or perhaps the Coronal—

Let it be Tyeveras, Hissune prayed. Oh, please, let it be Tyeveras!

Elidath said, “All right. Everyone’s here: we can begin.”

With a sour grin Divvis said, “What is it, Elidath? Has someone seen a two-headed milufta flying north?”

“If you mean, Is this a time of evil omen, then the answer is that it is,” said Elidath somberly.

“What has happened?” Stasilaine asked.

Elidath tapped a sheaf of papers on the desk. “Two important developments. First, fresh reports have come in from western Zimroel, and the situation is far more serious than we’ve realized. The entire Rift sector of the continent is disrupted, apparently, from Mazadone or thereabouts to a point somewhere west of Dulorn, and the trouble is spreading. Crops continue to die of mysterious blights, there’s a tremendous shortage of basic foods, and hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, have begun migrating toward the coast. Local officials are doing their best to requisition emergency food supplies from regions still unaffected—apparently there’s been no trouble yet around Tilomon or Narabal, and Ni-moya and Khyntor are still relatively untouched by the farming troubles—but the distances are so great and the situation so sudden that very little’s been accomplished so far. There is also the question of some peculiar new religious cult that has sprung up out there, something involving sea-dragon worship—”

“What?” said Stasilaine, astonishment bringing color to his face.

“It sounds insane, I know,” Elidath said. “But the report is that the word is spreading that the dragons are gods of some sort, and that they’ve decreed that the world is going to end, or some such idiocy, and—”

“It’s not a new cult,” said Hissune quietly.

The other three all turned to face him. “You know something about this?” Divvis asked.

Hissune nodded. “I used to hear of it sometimes when I lived in the Labyrinth. It’s always been a secret shadowy sort of thing, very vague, never taken too seriously so far as I ever knew. And strictly lower class, something to whisper about behind the backs of the gentry. Some of my friends knew a little about it, or maybe more than a little, though I was never mixed up in it. I remember mentioning it once to my mother long ago, and she told me it was dangerous nonsense and I should keep away from it, and I did. I think it got started among the Liimen, a long time ago, and has gradually been spreading across the bottom levels of society in an underground sort of way, and I suppose now is surfacing because of all the troubles that have begun.”

“And what’s the main belief?” Stasilaine asked.

“More or less as Elidath said: that the dragons will come ashore some day and take command of the government and end all misery and suffering.”

“What misery and suffering?” Divvis said. “I know of no great misery and suffering anywhere in the world, unless you refer to the whining and muttering of the Shapeshifters, and they—”

“You think everyone lives as we do on Castle Mount?” Hissune demanded.

“I think no one is left in need, that all are provided for, that we are happy and prosperous, that—”

“All this is true, Divvis. Nevertheless there are some who live in castles and some who sweep the dung of mounts from the highways. There are those who own great estates and those who beg for coins in the streets. There are—”

“Spare me. I need no lectures from you on social injustice.”

“Forgive me then for boring you,” Hissune snapped. “I thought you wanted to know why there were people who wait for water-kings to deliver them from hardship and pain.”

“Water-kings?” Elidath said.

“Sea dragons. So they are called by those who worship them.”

“Very well,” said Stasilaine. “There’s famine in Zimroel, and a troublesome cult is spreading among the lower classes. You said there were two important new developments. Are those the two you meant?”

Elidath shook his head. “Those are both parts of the same thing. The other important matter concerns Lord Valentine. I have heard from Tunigorn, who is greatly distressed. The Coronal, he says, has had some sort of revelation during his visit with his mother on the Isle, and has entered a mood of high elevation, a very strange mood indeed, in which he appears almost totally unpredictable.”

“What sort of revelation?” Stasilaine asked. “Do you know?”

“While in a trance guided by the Lady,” said Elidath, “he had a vision that showed him that the agricultural troubles in Zimroel indicate the displeasure of the Divine.”

“Who could possibly think otherwise?” Stasilaine cried. “But what does that have to—”

“According to Tunigorn, Valentine thinks now that the blights and the food shortages—which as we now know are much more serious than our own first reports made them seem—have a specifically supernatural origin—”

Divvis, shaking his head slowly, let out his breath in a derisive snort.

“—a specifically supernatural origin,” Elidath continued, “and are, in fact, a punishment imposed upon us by the Divine for our mistreatment of the Metamorphs down through the centuries.”

“But this is nothing new,” said Stasilaine. “He’s been talking that way for years.”

“Evidently it is something new,” Elidath replied. “Tunigorn says that since the day of the revelation, he’s been keeping mainly to himself, seeing only the Lady and Carabella, and sometimes Deliamber or the dream-speaker Tisana. Both Sleet and Tunigorn have had difficulty gaining access to him, and when they do it’s to discuss only the most routine matters. He seems inflamed, Tunigorn says, with some grandiose new idea, some really startling project, which he will not discuss with them.”

“This does not sound like the Valentine I know,” said Stasilaine darkly. “Whatever else he may be, irrational he is not. It sounds almost as though some fever has come over him.”

“Or that he’s been made a changeling again,” Divvis said.

“What does Tunigorn fear?” Hissune asked.

Elidath shrugged. “He doesn’t know. He thinks Valentine may be hatching some very bizarre idea indeed, one that he and Sleet would be likely to oppose. But he’s giving no clues.” Elidath went to the world globe, and tapped the bright red sphere that marked the Coronal’s whereabouts. “Valentine is still on the Isle, but he’ll sail shortly for the mainland. He’ll land in Piliplok, and he’s scheduled to head up the Zimr to Ni-moya and then keep going into the famine-stricken regions out west. But Tunigorn suspects that he’s changed his mind about that, that he’s obsessed with this notion that we’re suffering the vengeance of the Divine and might be planning some spiritual event, a fast, a pilgrimage, a restructuring of society in a direction away from purely secular values—”

“What if he’s involved with this sea-dragon cult?” Stasilaine said.

“I don’t know,” said Elidath. “It could be anything. I tell you only that Tunigorn seemed deeply troubled, and urged me to join the Coronal on the processional as quickly as I could, in the hope that I’ll be able to prevent him from doing something rash. I think I could succeed where others, even Tunigorn, would fail.”

“What?” Divvis cried. “He’s thousands of miles from here! How can you possibly—”

“I leave in two hours,” Elidath answered. “A relay of fast floaters will carry me westward through the Glayge Valley to Treymone, where I’ve requisitioned a cruiser to take me to Zimroel via the southern route and the Rodamaunt Archipelago. Tunigorn, meanwhile, will attempt to delay Valentine’s departure from the Isle as long as he can, and if he can get any cooperation from Admiral Asenhart he’ll see to it that the voyage from the Isle to Piliplok is a slow one. With any luck, I might reach Piliplok only a week or so after Valentine does, and perhaps it won’t be too late to bring him back to his senses.”

“You’ll never make it in time,” said Divvis. “He’ll be halfway to Ni-moya before you can cross the Inner Sea.”

“I must attempt it,” Elidath said. “I have no choice. If you knew how concerned Tunigorn is, how fearful that Valentine is about to commit himself to some mad and perilous course of action—”

“And the government?” Stasilaine said softly. “What of that? You are the regent, Elidath. We have no Pontifex, you tell us that the Coronal has become some sort of visionary madman, and now you propose to leave the Castle leaderless?”

“In the event that a regent is called away from the Castle,” said Elidath, “it’s within his powers to appoint a Council of Regency to deal with all business that would fall within the Coronal’s jurisdiction. This is what I intend.”

“And the members of this council?” Divvis asked.

“There will be three. You are one, Divvis. Stasilaine, you also. And you, Hissune.”

Hissune, astounded, sat bolt upright. “I?”

Elidath smiled. “I confess I couldn’t understand, at first, why Lord Valentine had chosen to advance someone of the Labyrinth, and such a young man at that, so quickly toward the center of power. But gradually his design has come clear to me, as this crisis has fallen upon us. We’ve lost touch, here on Castle Mount, with the realities of Majipoor. We’ve stayed up here on our mountaintop and mysteries have sprung up around us, without our knowing. I heard you say, Divvis, that you think everyone in the world is happy except perhaps the Metamorphs, and I confess I thought the same. And yet an entire religion, it seems, has taken root out there among the discontented, and we knew nothing of it, and now an army of hungry people marches toward Pidruid to worship strange gods.” He looked toward Hissune. “There are things you know, Hissune, that we need to learn. In the months of my absence, you’ll sit beside Divvis and Stasilaine in the place of judgment—and I believe you’ll offer valuable guidance. What do you say, Stasilaine?”

“I think you’ve chosen wisely.”

“And you, Divvis?”

Divvis’s face was blazing with barely controlled fury.

“What can I say? The power’s yours. You’ve made your appointment. I must abide by it, must I not?” He rose stiffly and held forth his hand to Hissune. “My congratulations, prince. You’ve done very well for yourself in a very short time.”

Hissune met Divvis’s cold gaze evenly. “I look forward to serving in the council with you, my lord Divvis,” said Hissune with great formality. “Your wisdom will be an example for me.” And he took Divvis’s hand.

Whatever reply Divvis intended to make seemed to choke in his throat. Slowly he withdrew his hand from Hissune’s grasp, glared, and stalked from the room.

11

The wind was out of the south, and hot and hard, the kind of wind that the dragon-hunting captains called “the Sending,” because it blew up from the barren continent of Suvrael where the King of Dreams had his lair. It was a wind that parched the soul and withered the heart, but Valentine paid no heed to it: his spirit was elsewhere, dreaming of the tasks that lay before him, and these days he stood for hours at a time on the royal deck of the Lady Thiin, looking to the horizon for the first sign of the mainland and giving no thought to the torrid, sharp-edged gusts that whistled about him.

The voyage from the Isle to Zimroel was beginning to seem interminable. Asenhart had spoken of a sluggish sea and contrary winds, of the need to shorten sail and take a more southerly route, and other such problems. Valentine, who was no sailor, could not quarrel with these decisions, but he grew fiercely impatient as the days went by and the western continent grew no closer. More than once they were compelled to change course to avoid sea-dragon herds, for on this side of the Isle the waters were thick with them. Some of the Skandar crewmen claimed that this was the greatest migration in five thousand years. Whether or not that was true, certainly they were abundant, and terrifying: Valentine had seen nothing like this on his last crossing of these waters many years ago, in that ill-fated journey when the giant dragon stove in the hull of Captain Gorzval’s Brangalyn.

Generally the dragons moved in groups of thirty to fifty, at several days’ distance from one another. But occasionally a single huge dragon, a veritable dragon-king, was seen swimming steadfastly by itself, moving unhurriedly, as though deep in weighty meditations. Then after a time no more dragons, great or small, were seen, and the wind strengthened, and the fleet made haste toward the port of Piliplok.

And one morning came shouts from the top deck: “Piliplok ho! Piliplok!”

The great seaport loomed up suddenly, dazzling and splendid in its forbidding, intense way, on its high promontory overlooking the southern shore of the mouth of the Zimr. Here, where the river was enormously wide and stained the sea dark for hundreds of miles with the silt it had swept from the heart of the continent, stood a city of eleven million people, rigidly laid out according to a complex and unyielding master design, spread out along with precise arcs intersected by the spokes of grand boulevards that radiated from the waterfront. It was, Valentine thought, a difficult city to love, for all the beauty of its broad welcoming harbor. Yet as he stood staring at it he caught sight of his Skandar companion Zalzan Kavol, who was native to Piliplok, gazing out upon it with a tender expression of wonder and delight on his harsh, dour face.

“The dragon-ships are coming!” someone cried, when the Lady Thiin was somewhat nearer to the shore. “Look, there, it must be the whole fleet!”

“Oh, Valentine, how lovely!” Carabella said softly, close beside him.

Lovely indeed. Until this moment, Valentine had never thought that the vessels in which the seafarers of Piliplok went forth to hunt the dragons were beautiful in any way. They were sinister things, swollen of hull, grotesquely decorated with hideous figureheads and threatening spiky tails and gaudy, painted rows of white teeth and scarlet-and-yellow eyes along their flanks; and taken one by one they seemed merely barbaric, repellent. Yet somehow in a flotilla this huge—and it looked as though every dragon-ship in Piliplok was on its way out to sea to greet the arriving Coronal—they took on a bizarre kind of glory. Along the line of the horizon their sails, black striped with crimson, bellied out in the breeze like festive flags.

When they drew near, they spread out about the royal fleet in what surely was a carefully planned formation, and hoisted great Coronal ensigns in green and gold into their riggings, and shouted raucously into the wind, “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!” The music of drums and trumpets and sistirons and galistanes drifted across the water, blurred and muddled but nonetheless jubilant and touching.

A very different reception, thought Valentine wryly, from the one he had had on his last visit to Piliplok, when he and Zalzan Kavol and the rest of the jugglers had gone pitifully from one dragon-captain to the next, trying in vain to hire one to carry them toward the Isle of Sleep, until finally they had managed to buy passage aboard the smallest and shabbiest and unluckiest vessel of all. But many things had altered since then.

The grandest of the dragon-ships now approached the Lady Thiin, and put forth a boat bearing a Skandar and two humans. When they came alongside, a floater-basket was lowered to draw them up on deck, but the humans remained at their oars, and only the Skandar came aboard.

She was old and weatherbeaten and tough-looking, with two of her powerful incisor teeth missing and fur of a dull grayish color. “I am Guidrag,” she said, and after a moment Valentine remembered her: the oldest and most revered of the dragon-captains, and one of those who had refused to take the jugglers on as passengers on her own ship; but she had refused in a kindly way, and had sent them on to Captain Gorzval and his Brangalyn. He wondered if she remembered him: very likely not. When one wears the Coronal’s robes, Valentine had long ago discovered, the man within the robes tends to become invisible.

Guidrag made a rough but eloquent speech of welcome on behalf of all her shipmates and fellow dragon-hunters and presented Valentine with an elaborately carved necklace made from interlocking sea-dragon bones. Afterward he gave thanks for this grand naval display, and asked her why the dragon-ship fleet was idle here in Piliplok harbor and not out hunting on the high seas; to which she replied that this year’s migration had brought the dragons past the coast in such astonishing and unprecedented numbers that all the dragon-ships had fulfilled their lawful quotas in the first few weeks of the hunt; their season had ended almost as soon as it had begun.

“This has been a strange year,” said Guidrag. “And I fear more strangeness awaits us, my lord.”

The escort of dragon-ships stayed close by, all the way to port. The royal party came ashore at Malibor Pier, in the center of the harbor, where a welcoming party waited: the duke of the province with a vast retinue, the mayor of the city and an equally vast swarm of officials, and a delegation of dragon-captains from the ships that had accompanied the Coronal to shore. Valentine entered into the ceremonies and rituals of greetings like one who dreams that he is awake: he responded gravely and courteously and at all the right times, he conducted himself with serenity and poise, and yet it was as though he moved through a throng of phantoms.

The highway from the harbor to the great hall of the city, where Valentine was to lodge, was lined with thick scarlet ropes to keep back the throngs, and guards were posted everywhere. Valentine, riding in an open-topped floater with Carabella at his side, thought that he had never heard such clamor, a constant incomprehensible roar of jubilant welcome so thunderous that it took his mind away, for the moment, from thoughts of crisis. But the respite lasted only a short while, for as soon as he was settled in his quarters he asked that the latest dispatches be brought him, and the news they contained was unrelievedly grim.

The lusavender blight, he learned, had spread somehow into the quarantined unaffected provinces. The stajja harvest was going to be half normal this year. A pest called the wireworm, long thought eradicated, had entered the regions where thuyol, an important forage crop, was grown: ultimately that would threaten the supply of meat. A fungus that attacked grapes had caused widespread dropping of unripe fruit in the wine country of Khyntor and Ni-moya. All of Zimroel now was affected by some sort of agricultural disturbance, except only the area of the remote southwest around the tropical city of Narabal.

Y-Uulisaan, when Valentine had showed him the reports, said gravely. “It will not be contained now. These are ecologically interlocking events: Zimroel’s food supply will be totally disrupted, my lord.”

“There are eight billion people in Zimroel!”

“Indeed. And when these blights spread to Alhanroel—?”

Valentine felt a chill. “You think they will?”

“Ah, my lord, I know they will! How many ships go back and forth between the continents each week? How many birds and even insects make the crossing? The Inner Sea is not that broad, and the Isle and the archipelagos make useful halfway houses.” With a strangely serene smile the agricultural expert said, “I tell you, my lord, this cannot be resisted, this cannot be defeated. There will be starvation. There will be plague. Majipoor will be devoured.”

“No. Not so.”

“If I could give you comforting words, I would. I have no comfort for you, Lord Valentine.”

The Coronal stared intently into Y-Uulisaan’s strange eyes. “The Divine has brought this catastrophe upon us,” he said. “The Divine will take it from us.”

“Perhaps. But not before there has been great damage. My lord, I ask permission to withdraw. May I study these papers an hour or so?”

When Y-Uulisaan had gone, Valentine sat quietly for a time, thinking through one last time the thing that he was intending to do, and which now seemed more urgent than ever, in the face of these calamitous new reports. Then he summoned Sleet and Tunigorn and Deliamber.

“I mean to change the route of the processional,” he said without preamble.

They looked warily toward one another, as though they had been expecting for weeks some such sort of troublesome surprise.

“We will not go on to Ni-moya at this time. Cancel all arrangements for Ni-moya and beyond.” He saw them staring at him in a tense and somber way, and knew he would not win their support without a struggle. “On the Isle of Sleep,” he continued, “it was made manifest to me that the blights that have come upon Zimroel, and which may before long come upon Alhanroel as well, are a direct demonstration of the displeasure of the Divine. You, Deliamber, raised that point with me long ago, when we were at the Velalisier ruins, and you suggested that the troubles of the realm that had grown from the usurpation of my throne might be the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs. We have gone a long way here on Majipoor, you said, without paying the price for the original sin of the conquerors, and now chaos was upon us because the past was starting to send us its reckoning at last, with compound interest added.”

“So I remember. Those were my words, almost exactly.”

“And I said,” Valentine went on, “that I would dedicate my reign to making reparations for the injustices we visited upon the Metamorphs. But I have not done that. I have been preoccupied with other problems, and have made only the most superficial of gestures toward entering into an understanding with the Shapeshifters. And while I delayed, our punishment has intensified. Now that I am on Zimroel, I intend to go at once to Piurifayne—”

“To Piurifayne, my lord?” said Sleet and Tunigorn in virtually the same instant.

“To Piurifayne, to the Shapeshifter capital at Ilirivoyne. I will meet with the Danipiur. I will hear her demands, and take cognizance of them. I—”

“No Coronal has ever gone into Metamorph territory before,” Tunigorn cut in.

“One Coronal has,” said Valentine. “In my time as a juggler I was there, and performed, in fact, before an audience of Metamorphs and the Danipiur herself.”

“A different matter,” Sleet said. “You could do anything you pleased, when you were a juggler. That time we went among the Shapeshifters, you scarce believed you were Coronal yourself. But now that you are undoubted Coronal—”

“I will go. As a pilgrimage of humility, as the beginning of an act of atonement.”

“My lord—!” Sleet sputtered.

Valentine smiled. “Go ahead. Give me all the arguments against it. I’ve been expecting for weeks to have a long dreary debate with you three about this, and now I suppose the time has come. But let me tell you this first: when we are done speaking, I will go to Piurifayne.”

“And nothing will shake you?” Tunigorn asked. “If we speak of the dangers, the breach of protocol, the possible adverse political consequences, the—”

“No. No. No. Nothing will shake me. Only by kneeling before the Danipiur can I bring an end to the disaster that is ravaging Zimroel.”

“Are you so sure, my lord,” said Deliamber, “that will be as simple as that?”

“It is something that must be tried. Of that I am convinced, and you will never shake me from my resolve.”

“My lord,” Sleet said, “it was the Shapeshifters that witched you off your throne, or so I do recall it, and I think you have some recollection of it also. Now the world stands at the edge of madness, and you propose to offer yourself up into their hands, in their own trackless forests. Does that seem—”

“Wise? No. Necessary? Yes, Sleet. Yes. One Coronal more or less doesn’t matter. There are many others who can take my place and do as well, or better. But the destiny of Majipoor matters. I must go to Ilirivoyne.”

“I beg you, my lord —”

“I beg you,” said Valentine. “We have talked enough. My mind is set on this.”

“You will go to Piurifayne,” said Sleet in disbelief. “You will offer yourself to the Shapeshifters.”

“Yes,” Valentine said. “I will offer myself to the Shape-shifters.”