Valentine Pontifex

1

“A strange day, my lord, when the Coronal must come as a beggar to the King of Dreams,” Sleet said, holding his hand outspread before his face to shield himself against the torrid wind that blew unrelentingly toward them out of Suvrael. Just a few hours more and they would make landfall at Tolaghai, largest of the southern continent’s ports.

“Not as a beggar, Sleet,” said Valentine quietly. “As a brother-in-arms, seeking aid against a common enemy.”

Carabella turned to him in surprise. “A brother-in-arms, Valentine? Never before have I heard you speak of yourself in such a warlike way.”

“We are at war, are we not?”

“And will you fight, then? And will you take lives with your own hand?”

Valentine peered closely at her, wondering if she were somehow trying to goad him; but no, her face was gentle as ever, her eyes were loving. He said, “You know I will never shed blood. But there are other ways of waging war. I have fought one war already, with you beside me: did I take life then?”

“But who were the enemies then?” Sleet demanded impatiently. “Your own dearest friends, misled by Shapeshifter deception—Elidath—Tunigorn—Stasilaine—Mirigant—all of them took the field against you. Of course you were gentle with them! You had no wish to slay such as Elidath and Mirigant: only to win them to your side.”

“Dominin Barjazid was no dear friend of mine. I spared him also: and I think we will be glad of that now.”

“An act of great mercy, yes. But we have a different sort of enemy now—Shapeshifter filth, cruel vermin—”

“Sleet—!”

“That is what they are, my lord! Creatures that have vowed to destroy all that we have built on our world.”

“On their world, Sleet,” said Valentine. “Remember that: this is their world.”

“Was, my lord. They lost it to us by default. A mere few million of them, on a planet large enough for—”

“And shall we have this tired dispute one more time, then?” Carabella burst out, making no effort to disguise her irritation. “Why? Is it not hard enough to breathe the blowtorch stuff that comes out of Suvrael, without straining our lungs in such futile talk as this?”

“I only mean to say, my lady, that the war of restoration was such a war as could be won by peaceful means, by open arms and a loving embrace. We have a different kind of enemy now. This Faraataa is consumed with hatred. He will not rest until we are all dead: and will he be won by love, do you think? Do you, my lord?”

Valentine looked away. “We will use whatever means are appropriate,” he said, “to make Majipoor whole again.”

“If you are sincere in what you say, then you must be prepared to destroy the enemy,” replied Sleet darkly. “Not merely pen them up in the jungle as Lord Stiamot did, but to exterminate them, to eradicate them, to end forever the threat to our civilization that they—”

“Exterminate? Eradicate?” Valentine laughed. “You sound prehistoric, Sleet!”

“He does not mean it literally, my lord,” Carabella said.

“Ah, he does, he does! Don’t you, Sleet?”

With a shrug Sleet said, “You know that my loathing of Metamorphs is not entirely of my own making, but was laid upon me in a sending—a sending out of that very land that lies ahead of us. But apart from that: I think their lives are forfeit, yes, for the damage they have already done. I make no apology for believing that.”

“And you would massacre millions of people for the crimes of our leaders? Sleet, Sleet, you are more than a threat to our civilization than ten thousand Metamorphs!”

Color surged to Sleet’s pale fleshless cheeks, but he said nothing.

“You are offended by that,” Valentine said. “I meant no offense.”

In a low voice Sleet said, “The Coronal need not ask the pardon of the bloodthirsty barbarian who serves him, my lord.”

“I had no desire to mock you. Only to disagree with you.”

“Then let us disagree,” said Sleet. “If I were Coronal, I would kill them all.”

“But I am Coronal—at least in some parts of this world. And so long as I am, I will search for ways of winning this war that fall short of exterminations and eradications. Is that acceptable to you, Sleet?”

“Whatever the Coronal wishes is acceptable to me, and you know it, my lord. I tell you only what I would do if I were Coronal.”

“May the Divine spare you from that fate,” said Valentine, with a faint smile.

“And you, my lord, from the need to meet violence with violence, for I know it is not in your nature,” responded Sleet, smiling even more faintly. He offered a formal salute. “We will be arriving shortly in Tolaghai,” he said, “and I must make a great many arrangements for our accommodations. May I have leave to withdraw, my lord?”

As Sleet moved off down the deck, Valentine stared after him a moment; then, shading his eyes against the harsh blaze of the sun, he stared into the wind at the southern continent, now a dark massive shape sprawling on the horizon.

Suvrael! The name alone evoked a shiver!

He had never expected to come here: the stepchild among Majipoor’s continents, forgotten, neglected, a sparsely populated place of barren and forbidding wastelands, almost entirely bleak and arid, so little like the rest of Majipoor as to seem almost like a slice of some other planet. Though millions of people dwelled here, clustered in half a dozen cities scattered through the least uninhabitable regions of the place, Suvrael for centuries had maintained only the most perfunctory of ties with the two main continents. When officials of the central government were sent off for a tour of duty there, they regarded it virtually as a penal sentence. Few Coronals had ever visited it. Valentine had heard that Lord Tyeveras had been there, on one of his several grand processionals, and he thought that Lord Kinniken once had done the same. And of course there was the famous exploit of Dekkeret, roaming the Desert of Stolen Dreams in the company of the founder of the Barjazid dynasty, but that had happened long before he had become Coronal.

Out of Suvrael came only three things that impinged on the life of Majipoor in any important way. One was wind: out of Suvrael at all months of the year poured a torrent of searing air that fell brutally upon the southern shores of Alhanroel and Zimroel and rendered them nearly as disagreeable as Suvrael itself. Another was meat: on the western side of the desert continent, mists rising from the sea drifted inland to sustain a vast grassland where cattle were raised for shipment to the other continents. And the third great export of Suvrael was dreams. For a thousand years now the Barjazids had held sway as Powers of the realm from their great domain inland of Tolaghai: with the aid of thought-amplifying devices, whose secret they jealously guarded, they filled the world with their sendings, stern and troublesome infiltrations of the soul that sought and found anyone who had done injury to a fellow citizen, or even was merely contemplating it. In their harsh and austere way the Barjazids were the consciences of the world, and they long had been the rod and the scourge by which the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady of the Isle were able to sustain their more benign and gentle mode of government.

The Metamorphs, when they made their first abortive try at insurrection early in Valentine’s reign, had understood the power of the King of Dreams, and when the head of the Barjazids, old Simonan, had fallen ill, they had cunningly substituted one of their own in the place of the dying man. Which had led then to the usurpation of Lord Valentine’s throne by Simonan’s youngest son Dominin, though he had never suspected that the one who had urged him into that rash adventure was not his true father but a Metamorph counterfeit.

And yes, Valentine thought, Sleet was right: how strange indeed that the Coronal now should be turning to the Barjazids almost as a suppliant, when his throne was once more in jeopardy.

He had come almost accidentally to Suvrael. In making their retreat from Piurifayne, Valentine and his party had taken a sharp southeasterly route toward the sea, for it would clearly have been unwise to go northeast to rebellious Piliplok, and the central part of the Gihorna coast was without cities or harbors. They emerged finally close by the southern tip of eastern Zimroel, in the isolated province known as Bellatule, a humid tropical land of tall saw-edged grasses, spice-muck swamps, and feathered serpents.

The people of Bellatule were Hjorts, mainly: sober, glum-faced folk with bulging eyes and vast mouths filled with rows of rubbery chewing-cartilage. Most of them earned their livelihoods in the shipping trade, receiving manufactured goods from all over Majipoor and forwarding them to Suvrael in return for cattle. Since the recent worldwide upheavals had caused a sharp drop in manufacturing output and a nearly total breakdown in the traffic between provinces, the merchants of Bellatule were finding their trade greatly diminished; but at least there had been no famines, because the province was generally self-sufficient in its food supply, depending largely on its bountiful fisheries, and such little agriculture as was practiced there had been untouched by the blights afflicting other regions. Bellatule seemed calm and had remained loyal to the central government.

Valentine had hoped to take ship there for the Isle, in order to confer on matters of strategy with his mother. But the shipmasters of Bellatule warned him sternly against making the voyage to the Isle just now. “No ship’s gone north from here in months,” they told him. “It’s the dragons: they’re running crazy out there, smashing anything that sails up the coast or across toward the Archipelago. A voyage north or east while that’s going on would be suicide and nothing else.” It might be six or eight months more, they believed, before the last of the dragon swarms that lately had rounded the southeastern corner of Zimroel had completed their journey into northern waters and the maritime lanes were open again.

The prospect of being trapped in remote and obscure Bellatule appalled Valentine. Going back into Piurifayne seemed pointless, and making any sort of overland trek around the Metamorph province into the vast middle of the continent would be risky and slow. But there was one other option. “We can take you to Suvrael, my lord,” the shipmasters said. “The dragons have not entered the southern waters at all and the route remains untroubled.” Suvrael? At first consideration the idea was bizarre. But then Valentine thought, Why not? The aid of the Barjazids might be valuable; certainly it ought not be scorned out of hand. And perhaps there was some sea route out of the southern continent to the Isle, or to Alhanroel, that would take him beyond the zone infested by the unruly sea dragons. Yes. Yes.

So, then: Suvrael. The voyage was a swift one. And now the fleet of Bellatule merchantmen, gliding steadily southward against the scorching wind, began its entry into Tolaghai harbor.

The city baked in the late afternoon heat. It was a dismal place, a featureless clutter of mud-colored buildings a story or two high, stretching on and on along the shore and interminably back toward the ridge of low hills that marked the boundary between the coastal plain and the brutal interior desert. As the royal party was escorted ashore, Carabella glanced at Valentine in consternation. He offered her an encouraging smile, but without much conviction. Castle Mount seemed just then to be not ten thousand miles away, but ten million.

But five magnificent floaters ornamented with bold stripes of purple and yellow, the colors of the King of Dreams, waited in the courtyard of the customs house. Guards in livery of the same colors stood before them; and, as Valentine and Carabella approached, a tall, powerful-looking man with a thick black beard lightly flecked with gray emerged from one of the floaters and began to walk slowly toward them, limping slightly.

Valentine remembered that limp well, for it once had been his. As had the body that the black-bearded man once wore: for this was Dominin Barjazid, the former usurper, by whose orders Lord Valentine had been cast into the body of some unknown golden-haired man so that the Barjazid, taking Valentine’s own body for his own, might rule in Valentine’s guise on Castle Mount. And the limp was the doing of the young Valentine of long ago, when he had smashed his leg in a foolish accident while riding with Elidath in the pygmy forest by Amblemorn on the Mount.

“My lord, welcome,” said Dominin Barjazid with great warmth. “You do us a high honor by this visit, for which we have hoped so many years.”

Most submissively he offered Valentine the starburst gesture—with trembling hands, the Coronal observed. Valentine was far from unmoved himself. For it was a strange and disturbing experience once again to see his first body, now in the possession of another. He had not cared to undergo the risk of having that body back, after the defeat of Dominin, but all the same it stirred a mighty confusion in him to see another’s soul looking outward through his eyes. And also it stirred him to see the onetime usurper now so wholly redeemed and cleansed of his treasons and so genuine in his hospitality.

There had been some who had wanted Dominin put to death for his crime. But Valentine had never been willing to countenance such talk. Perhaps some barbarian king on some remote prehistoric world might have had his enemies executed, but no crime—not even an attempt on a Coronal’s life—had ever drawn so severe a penalty on Majipoor. Besides, the fallen Dominin had collapsed into madness, his mind wholly shattered by the revelation that his father, the supposed King of Dreams, was in truth a Metamorph impostor.

It would have been senseless to impose any sort of punishment on such a ruined creature. Valentine, upon resuming his throne, had pardoned Dominin and had had him handed over to emissaries of his family, so that he might be returned to Suvrael. There he slowly mended. Some years afterward he had begged leave to come to the Castle to ask the Coronal’s forgiveness. “You have my pardon already,” Valentine had replied; but Dominin came anyway, and knelt most humbly and sincerely before him on audience day in the Confalume throne-room, and cleared the burden of treason from his soul.

Now, thought Valentine, the circumstances are greatly altered once again: for this is Dominin’s own domain, and I am little more than a fugitive in it.

Dominin said, “My royal brother Minax has sent me, my lord, to convey you to Palace Barjazid, where you are to be our guest. Will you ride with me in the lead floater?”

The palace lay well outside Tolaghai, in a cruel and doleful valley. Valentine had seen it now and then in dreams: an ominous, menacing structure of dark stone, topped with a fantastic array of sharp-tipped towers and angular parapets. Clearly it had been designed to intimidate the eye and inspire dread.

“How hideous!” Carabella whispered, as they neared it.

“Wait,” said Valentine. “Only wait!”

They passed within the great gloomy portcullis and entered a place that on the inside displayed no kinship to its forbidding and repellent exterior. Airy courtyards resounded to the gentle music of splashing fountains, and cool, fragrant breezes replaced the bitter heat of the outer world. As Valentine dismounted from the floater with Carabella on his arm, he saw servitors waiting with iced wines and sherbets, and heard musicians strumming on delicate instruments. In the midst of all waited two figures clad in loose white robes, one soft-faced and pale and round-bellied, the other lean, hawk-faced, tanned almost black by the desert sun. About the forehead of the hawk-faced one rested the dazzling golden diadem that marked him as a Power of Majipoor. Valentine scarcely needed to be told that this was Minax Barjazid, now King of Dreams in his late father’s place. The other and softer man was his brother Cristoph, in all likelihood. Both made the starburst gesture, and Minax came forward to offer Valentine a bowl of chilled blue wine with his own hands.

“My lord,” he said, “these are stark times in which you come calling on us. But we greet you in all joy, no matter how somber the moment seems. We are mightily in your debt, my lord. All that is ours is yours. And all that we command is at your service.” It was obviously a speech he had prepared with care, and the resonance and smoothness of his delivery showed careful rehearsal. But then the King of Dreams leaned forward until his hard and glittering eyes were only inches from the Coronal’s own, and in a different voice, deeper, more private, he said, “You may have refuge here as long as you wish.”

Quietly Valentine replied, “You misunderstand, your highness. I have not come here to take refuge, but to seek your aid in the struggle that lies ahead.”

The King of Dreams seemed startled by that. “Such aid as I can give is yours, of course. But do you truly see any hope that we can fight our way free of the turmoil that assails us? For I must tell you, my lord, that I have looked at the world very closely through this”—he touched his diadem of power—“and I see no hope myself, my lord, none, none at all.”

2

An hour before twilight the chanting started again down in Ni-moya: thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of voices crying out with tremendous force, “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon! Thallimon! Thallimon!” The sound of that fierce jubilant outcry came rolling up the slopes of the outlying Gimbeluc district and swept over the quiet precincts of the Park of Fabulous Beasts like a great unstoppable wave.

It was the third day since the demonstrations in honor of the newest of the new Coronals had begun, and tonight’s uproar was the most frenzied so far. Very likely it was accompanied by rioting, looting, widespread destruction. But Yarmuz Khitain scarcely cared. This had already been one of the most terrifying days he had experienced in all his long tenure as curator of the park, an assault on everything that he considered proper and rational and sane: why should he now be perturbed over a little noise that some fools were making in the city?

At dawn that day Yarmuz Khitain had been awakened by a very young assistant curator who told him timidly, “Vingole Nayila has come back, sir. He is waiting at the east gate.”

“Has he brought much back with him?”

“Oh, yes, sir! Three transport floaters full, sir!”

“I’ll be right down,” said Yarmuz Khitain.

Vingole Nayila, the park’s chief field zoologist, had been exploring for the past five months in the disturbed areas of north central Zimroel. He was not a man of whom Yarmuz Khitain was greatly fond, for he tended to be cocky and overly self-satisfied, and whenever he exposed himself to deadly peril in the pursuit of some elusive beast he made sure that everyone knew just how deadly the peril had been. But professionally he was superb, an extraordinary collector of wild animals, indefatigable, fearless. When news had first begun to arrive that unfamiliar and grotesque creatures were causing havoc in the region between Khyntor and Dulorn, Nayila had lost no time mounting an expedition.

And a successful one, evidently. When Yarmuz Khitain reached the east gate he saw Nayila strutting busily about on the far side of the energy field that kept intruders out and the rare animals in. Beyond that zone of pink haze Nayila was supervising the unloading of a vast number of wooden containers, from which came all manner of hisses and growls and buzzes and drones and yelps. At the sight of Khitain, Nayila looked across and yelled:

“Khitain! You won’t believe what I’ve brought back!”

“Will I want to?” asked Yarmuz Khitain.

The accessioning process, it seemed, had already begun: the entire staff, such as still remained, had turned out to transport Nayila’s animals in their boxes through the gate and off toward the receiving building, where they could be installed in holding cages until enough was understood about them to allow their release into one of the open habitat ranges. “Careful!” Nayila bellowed, as two men struggling with a massive container nearly let it fall on its side. “If that animal gets loose, we’re all going to be sorry—but you first of all!” Turning to Yarmuz Khitain, he said, “It’s a real horror show. Predators—all predators—teeth like knives, claws like razors—I’m damned if I know how I got back here alive. Half a dozen times I thought I was done for, and me not having even recorded any of this for the Register of Souls. What a waste that would have been, what a waste! But here I am. Come—you’ve got to see these things—!”

A horror show, yes. All morning long, and on deep into the afternoon, Yarmuz Khitain found himself witness to a procession of the impossible and the hideous and the wholly unacceptable: freaks, monsters, ghastly anomalies.

“These were running around on the outskirts of Mazadone,” said Nayila, indicating a pair of small furious snarling animals with fiery red eyes and three savagely sharp horns ten inches long rising from their foreheads. Yarmuz Khitain recognized them by their thick reddish fur as haiguses—but never had he seen a haigus with horns, nor any so determinedly vicious. “Nasty little killers,” Nayila said. “I watched them run down a poor blave that had gone wild, and kill it in five minutes by leaping up and goring it in the belly. I bagged them while they were feeding, and then this thing came down to finish off the carcass.” He pointed to a dark-winged canavong with a sinister black beak and a single glowering eye in the center of its distended forehead: an innocent scavenger mysteriously transformed into a thing out of a nightmare. “Have you ever seen anything so ugly?”

“I would never want to see anything uglier,” said Yarmuz Khitain.

“But you will. You will. Uglier, meaner, nastier—just watch what comes out of these crates.”

Yarmuz Khitain was not sure he wanted to. He had spent all his life with animals—studying them, learning their ways, caring for them. Loving them, in a real sense of the word. But these—these—

“And then look at this,” Nayila went on. “A miniature dhumkar, maybe a tenth the size of the standard model, and fifty times as quick. It isn’t content to sit there in the sand and poke around with its snout in search of its dinner. No, it’s an evil little fast-moving thing that comes right after you, and would sooner chew your foot off at the ankle than breathe. Or this: a manculain, wouldn’t you say?”

“Of course. But there are no manculains in Zimroel.”

“That’s what I thought, too, until I saw this fellow back of Velathys, along the mountain roads. Very similar to the manculains of Stoienzar, is it not? But with at least one difference.” He knelt beside the cage that held the rotund many-legged creature and made a deep rumbling sound at it. The manculain at once rumbled back and began menacingly to stir the long stiletto-like needles that sprouted all over its body, as though it intended to hurl them through the wire mesh at him. Nayila said, “It isn’t content with being covered with spines. The spines are poisonous. One scratch with them and your arm puffs up for a week. I know. I don’t know what would have happened if the spine got in any deeper, and I don’t want to find out. Do you?”

Yarmuz Khitain shivered. It sickened him to think of these horrendous creatures taking up residence in the Park of Fabulous Beasts, which had been founded long ago as a refuge for those animals, most of them gentle and inoffensive, that had been driven close to extinction by the spread of civilization on Majipoor. Of course the park had a good many predators in its collection, and Yarmuz Khitain had never felt like offering apologies for them: they were the work of the Divine, after all, and if they found it necessary to kill for their meals it was not out of any innate malevolence that they did so. But these—these—

These animals are evil, he thought. They ought to be destroyed.

The thought astounded him. Nothing like it had ever crossed his mind before. Animals evil? How could animals be evil? He could say, I think this animal is very ugly, or,I think this animal is very dangerous, but evil? No. No, Animals are not capable of being evil, not even these. The evil has to reside elsewhere: in their creators. No, not even in them. They too have their reasons for setting these beasts loose upon the world, and the reason is not sheer malevolence for its own sake, unless I am greatly mistaken. Where then is the evil? The evil, Khitain told himself, is everywhere, a pervasive thing that slips and slides between the atoms of the air we breathe. It is a universal corruption in which we all participate. Except the animals.

Except the animals.

“How is it possible,” Yarmuz Khitain asked, “that the Metamorphs have the skill to breed such things?”

“The Metamorphs have many skills we’ve never bothered to learn a thing about, it would appear. They’ve been sitting out there in Piurifayne concocting these animals quietly for years, building up their stock of them. Can you imagine what the place where they kept them all must have been like—a horror zoo, monsters only? And now they’ve been kind enough to share them with us.”

“But can we be certain the animals come from Piurifayne?”

“I traced the distribution vectors very carefully. The lines radiate outward from the region southwest of Ilirivoyne. This is Metamorph work, no doubt about that. It simply can’t happen that two or three dozen loathsome new kinds of animals would burst onto the scene in Zimroel all at the same time by spontaneous mutation. We know that we’re at war: these are weapons, Khitain.”

The older man nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“I’ve saved the worst for last. Come: look at these.”

In a cage of closely woven metal mesh so fine that he was able to see through its walls, Khitain observed an agitated horde of small winged creatures fluttering angrily about, battering themselves against the sides of the cage, striking it furiously with their leathery black wings, falling back, rising again for another try. They were furry little things about eight inches long, with disproportionately large mouths and beady, glittering red eyes.

“Dhiims,” said Nayila. “I captured them in a dwikka forest over by Borgax.”

“Dhiims?” Khitain said hoarsely.

“Dhiims, yes. Found them feeding on a couple of little forest-brethren that I suppose they’d killed—so busy eating they didn’t see me coming. I knocked them out with my collecting spray and gathered them up. A few of them woke up before I got them all in the box. I’m lucky still to have my fingers, Yarmuz.”

“I know dhiims,” said Khitain. “They’re two inches long, half an inch wide. These are the size of rats.”

“Yes. Rats that fly. Rats that eat flesh. Carnivorous giant dhiims, eh? Dhiims that don’t just nibble and nip, dhiims that can strip a forest-brother down to its bones in ten minutes. Aren’t they lovely? Imagine a swarm of them flying into Ni-moya. A million, two million—thick as mosquitos in the air. Sweeping down. Eating everything in their way. A new plague of locusts—flesh-eating locusts—”

Khitain felt himself growing very calm. He had seen too much today. His mind was overloaded with horror.

“They would make life very difficult,” he said mildly.

“Yes. Very very difficult, eh? We’d need to dress in suits of armor.” Nayila laughed. “The dhiims are their masterpiece, Khitain. You don’t need bombs when you can launch deadly little flying rodents against your enemy. Eh? Eh?”

Yarmuz Khitain made no reply. He stared at the cage of frenzied angry dhiims as though he were looking into a pit that reached down to the core of the world.

From far away he heard the shouting begin: “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

Nayila frowned, cocked an ear, strained to make out the words. “Thallimon? Is that what they’re yelling?”

“Lord Thallimon,” said Khitain. “The new Coronal. The new new Coronal. He surfaced three days ago, and every night they have a big rally for him outside Nissimorn Prospect.”

“There was a Thallimon who used to work here. Is this some relative of his?”

“The same man,” Khitain said.

Vingole Nayila looked stunned.

“What? Six months ago he was sweeping dung out of zoo cages, and now he’s Coronal? Is it possible?”

“Anybody can be Coronal now,” Yarmuz Khitain said placidly. “But only for a week or two, so it seems. Perhaps it will be your turn soon, Vingole.” He chuckled. “Or mine.”

“How did this happen, Yarmuz?”

Khitain shrugged. With a wide sweep of his hand he indicated Nayila’s newly collected animals, the snarling three-horned haigus, the dwarf dhumkar, the single-eyed canavong, the dhiims: everything bizarre and frightful, everything taut with dark hunger and rage. “How did any of this happen?” he asked. “If such strangenesses as these are loosed upon the world, why not make dung sweepers into Coronals? First jugglers, then dung sweepers, then zoologists, maybe. Well, why not? How does it sound to you? Vingole! Lord Vingole! All hail Lord Vingole!’”

“Stop it, Yarmuz.”

“You’ve been off in the forest with your dhiims and your manculains. I’ve had to watch what’s been happening here. I feel very tired, Vingole. I’ve seen too much.”

“Lord Thallimon! Imagine!”

“Lord this, Lord that, Lord whoever—a plague of Coronals all month, and a couple of Pontifexes too. They don’t last long. But let’s hope Thallimon does. At least he’s likely to protect the park,” said Khitain.

“Against what?”

“Mob attack. There are hungry people down there, and up here we continue to feed the animals. They tell me that agitators in the city are stirring people up to break into the park and butcher everything for meat.”

“Are you serious?”

“Apparently they are.”

“But these animals are priceless—irreplaceable—!”

“Tell that to a starving man, Vingole,” said Khitain quietly.

Nayila stared at him. “And do you really think this Lord Thallimon is going to hold back the mob, if they decide to attack the park?”

“He worked here once. He knows the importance of what we have here. He must have had some love for the animals, don’t you think?”

“He swept out the cages, Yarmuz.”

“Even so—”

“He may be hungry himself, Yarmuz.”

“The situation is bad, but not that desperate. Not yet. And in any case what can be gained by eating a few scrawny sigimoins and dimilions and zampidoons? One meal, for a few hundred people, at such a cost to science?”

“Mobs aren’t rational,” Nayila said. “And you overestimate your dung-sweeper Coronal, I suspect. He may have hated this place—hated his job, hated you, hated the animals. Also he may decide that there are political points to be made by leading his supporters up the hill for dinner. He knows how to get through the gates, doesn’t he?”

“Why—I suppose—”

“The whole staff does. Where the key-boxes are, how to neutralize the field so that you can pass through—”

“He wouldn’t!”

“He may, Yarmuz. Take measures. Arm your people.”

“Arm them? With what? Do you think I keep weapons here?”

“This place is unique. Once the animals perish, they’ll never be restored. You have a responsibility, Yarmuz.”

From the distance—but not, Khitain thought, so distant as before—came the cry: “Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

Nayila said, “Are they coming, do you think?”

“He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.”

“Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

“It sounds closer,” Nayila said.

There was a commotion down at the far end of the room. One of the groundkeepers had come running in, breathless, wild-eyed, calling Khitain’s name. “Hundreds of people!” he cried. “Thousands! Heading toward Gimbeluc!”

Khitain felt panic rising. He looked about at the members of his staff. “Check the gates. Make absolutely sure everything’s shut tight. Then start closing the inner gates— whatever animals are out in the field should be pushed as far to the northern end of the park as possible. They’ll have a better chance to hide in the woods back there. And—”

“This is not the way,” Vingole Nayila said.

“What else can we do? I have no weapons, Vingole. I have no weapons!”

“I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I risked my life a thousand times to collect the animals in this park. Especially the ones I brought in today. I intend to defend them.” He turned away from Yarmuz Khitain. “Here! Here, give me a hand with this cage!”

“What are you doing, Vingole?”

“Never mind. Go see after your gates.” Without waiting for help, Nayila began to shove the cage of dhiims onto the little floater-dolly on which it had been rolled into the building. Khitain suddenly comprehended what weapon it was that Nayila meant to use. He rushed forward, tugging at the younger man’s arm. Nayila easily pushed him aside, and, ignoring Khitain’s hoarse protests, guided the dolly out of the building.

The invaders from the city, still roaring their leader’s name, sounded closer and closer. The park will be destroyed, Khitain thought, aghast. And yet—if Nayila truly intends—

No. No. He rushed from the building, peered through the dusk, caught sight of Vingole Nayila far away, down by the east gate. The chanting was much louder now. “Thallimon! Thallimon!”

Khitain saw the mob, spilling into the broad plaza on the far side of the gate, where each morning the public waited until the hour of opening arrived. That fantastic figure in weird red robes with white trim—that was Thallimon, was it not? Standing atop some sort of palanquin, waving his arms madly, urging the crowd on. The energy field surrounding the park would hold back a few people, or an animal or two, but it was not designed to withstand the thrust of a vast frenzied mob. One did not ordinarily have to worry about vast frenzied mobs here. But now—

“Go back!” Nayila cried. “Stay away! I warn you!”

“Thallimon! Thallimon!”

“I warn you, keep out of here!”

They paid no attention. They thundered forward like a herd of maddened bidlaks, charging without heeding anything before them. As Khitain watched in dismay, Nayila signaled to one of the gatemen, who briefly deactivated the energy barrier, long enough for Nayila to shove the cage of dhiims forward into the plaza, yank open the bolt that fastened its door, and dart back behind the safety of the hazy pink glow.

“No,” Khitain muttered. “Not even for the sake of defending the park—no—no—”

The dhiims streamed from their cage with such swiftness that one little animal blurred into the next, and they became an airborne river of golden fur and frantic black wings.

They sped upward, thirty, forty feet, and then turned and swooped down with terrible force and implacable voracity, plunging into the vanguard of the mob as though they had not eaten in months. Those under attack did not seem at first to realize what was happening to them; they tried to sweep the dhiims away with irritated backhand swipes, as one might try to sweep away annoying insects. But the dhiims would not be swept away so easily. They dived and struck and tore away strips of flesh, and flew upward to devour their meat in mid-air, and came swooping down again. The new Lord Thallimon, spurting blood from a dozen wounds, tumbled from his palanquin and went sprawling to the ground. The dhiims closed in, returning to those in the front line who had already been wounded, and slicing at them again and again, burrowing deep, twisting and tugging at strands of exposed muscle and the tenderer tissues beneath them. “No,” said Khitain over and over, from his vantage point behind the gate. “No. No. No.” The furious little creatures were merciless. The mob was in flight, people screaming, running in all directions, a chaos of colliding bodies as they sought to find the road back down to Ni-moya, and those who had fallen lay in scarlet pools as the dhiims dived and dived and dived again. Some had been laid bare to the bone—mere rags and scraps of flesh remaining, and that too being stripped away. Khitain heard sobbing; and only after a moment realized that it was his own.

Then it was all over. A strange silence settled over the plaza. The mob had fled; the victims on the pavement no longer moaned; the dhiims, sated, hovered briefly over the scene, wings whirring, and then rose one by one into the night and flew off, the Divine only knew where.

Yarmuz Khitain, trembling, shaken, walked slowly away from the gate. The park was saved. The park was saved. Turning, he looked toward Vingole Nayila, who stood like an avenging angel with his arms outspread and his eyes blazing. “You should not have done that,” Khitain said in a voice so choked with shock and loathing that he could barely get the words out.

“They would have destroyed the park.”

“Yes, the park is saved. But look—look—”

Nayila shrugged. “I warned them. How could I let them destroy all we have built here, just to have a little fresh meat?”

“You should not have done it, all the same.”

“You think so? I have no regrets, Yarmuz. Not one.” He considered that a moment. “Ah: there is one. I wish I had had time to put a few of the dhiims aside, for our collection. But there was no time, and they are all far away by now, and I have no wish to go back to Borgax and look for others. I regret nothing else, Yarmuz. And I had no choice but to turn them loose. They have saved the park. How could we have let those madmen destroy it? How, Yarmuz? How?”

3

Though it was barely past dawn, brilliant sunlight illuminated the wide and gentle curves of the Glayge Valley when Hissune, rising early, stepped out on the deck of the riverboat that was carrying him back toward Castle Mount.

Of to the west, where the river made a fat bend into a district of terraced canyons, all was misty and hidden, as though this were time’s first morning. But when he looked toward the east Hissune saw the serene red-tiled roofs of the great city of Pendiwane glowing in the early light, and far upriver the sinuous low shadow of the Makroposopos waterfront was just coming into view. Beyond lay Apocrune, Stangard Falls, Nimivan, and the rest of the valley cities, home to fifty million people or more. Happy places where life was easy; but now the menacing aura of imminent disruption hung over these cities, and Hissune knew that all up and down the Glayge people were waiting, wondering, fearing.

He wanted to stretch forth his arms to them from the prow of the riverboat, to enfold them all in a warm embrace, to cry out, “Fear nothing! The Divine is with us! All will be well!”

But was it true?

No one knows the will of the Divine, Hissune thought. But, lacking that knowledge, we must shape our destinies according to our sense of what is fitting. Like sculptors we carve our lives out of the raw stone of the future, hour by hour by hour, following whatever design it is that we hold in our minds; and if the design is sound and our carving is done well, the result will seem pleasing when the last chisel-stroke is made. But if our design is slapdash and our carving is hasty, why, the proportions will be inelegant and the balance untrue. And if the work thus be faulty, can we say it was the will of the Divine that it is so? Or, rather, only that our plan was poorly conceived?

My plan, he told himself, must not be poorly conceived.

And then all will be well; and then it will be said that the Divine was with us.

Throughout the swift river-journey northward he shaped and reshaped it, as he traveled past Jerrik and Ghiseldorn and Sattinor where the upper Glayge flowed from the foothills of Castle Mount. By the time he reached Amblemorn, southwesternmost of the Fifty Cities of the Mount, the design of what had to be done was clear and strong in his mind.

Here it was impossible to continue farther by the river, for Amblemorn was where the Glayge was born out of the host of tributaries that came tumbling down out of the Mount, and none of those lesser rivers was navigable. By floater, then, he proceeded up the flank of the Mount, through the ring of Slope Cities and that of Free Cities and that of Guardian Cities, past Morvole, where Elidath was born, and Normork of the great wall and the great gate, past Huyn, where the leaves of all the trees were scarlet or crimson or ruby or vermilion, past Greel of the crystal palisade and Sigla Higher of the five vertical lakes, and onward still, to the Inner Cities, Banglecode and Bombifale and Peritole and the rest, and on, on, the party of floaters racing up the enormous mountain.

“It is more than I can believe,” said Elsinome, who was making this journey at her son’s side. Never had she ventured from the Labyrinth at all, and to begin her travels in the world by the ascent of Castle Mount was no small assignment. Her eyes were as wide as a small child’s, Hissune observed with pleasure, and there were days when she seemed so surfeited with miracles that she could scarcely speak.

“Wait,” he said. “You have seen nothing.”

Through Peritole Pass to Bombifale Plain, where the decisive battle of the war of restoration had been fought, and past the wondrous spires of Bombifale itself, and up another level to the zone of the High Cities—the mountain road of gleaming red flagstone led from Bombifale to High Morpin, then through fields of dazzling flowers along the Grand Calintane Highway, and up and up until Lord Valentine’s Castle loomed overwhelmingly at the summit of all, sending its tentacles of brick and masonry wandering in a thousand directions over the crags and peaks.

As his floater entered the Dizimaule Plaza outside the southern wing, Hissune was startled to see a delegation of welcomers waiting for him. Stasilaine was there, and Mirigant, and Elzandir, and a retinue of aides. But not Divvis.

“Have they come to hail you as Coronal?” Elsinome asked, and Hissune smiled and shook his head.

“I doubt that very much,” he said.

As he strode toward them across the green porcelain cobblestones he wondered what changes had occurred here during his absence. Had Divvis proclaimed himself Coronal? Were his friends here to warn him to flee while he had the chance? No, no, they were smiling; they clustered round, they embraced him jubilantly.

“What news?” Hissune asked.

“Lord Valentine lives!” cried Stasilaine.

“The Divine be praised! Where is he now?”

“Suvrael,” said Mirigant. “He is a guest at Palace Barjazid. So says the King of Dreams himself, and we have this very day had confirming word from the Coronal.”

“Suvrael!” Hissune repeated in wonder, as though he had been told that Valentine had taken himself off to some unknown continent in the midst of the Great Sea, or to some other world entirely. “Why Suvrael? How did he get there?”

“He came forth from Piurifayne in the land of Bellatule,” Stasilaine replied, “and the unruliness of the dragons kept him from sailing north; and also Piliplok, as I think you know, is in rebellion. So the Bellatule folk took him to the southland, and there he has forged an alliance with the Barjazids, who will use their powers to bring the world back to sanity.”

“A bold move.”

“Indeed. He sails shortly for the Isle to meet again with the Lady.”

“And then?” Hissune asked.

“That is not yet determined.” Stasilaine peered closely at Hissune. “The shape of the months ahead is not clear to us.”

“I think it is to me,” said Hissune. “Where is Divvis?”

“He has gone hunting today,” Elzandir said. “In the forest by Frangior.”

“Why, that is an unlucky place for his family!” Hissune said. “Is that not where his father Lord Voriax was slain?”

“So it is,” said Stasilaine.

“I hope he is more careful,” Hissune said. “There are great tasks ahead for him. And it surprises me that he is not here, if he knew that this was the day of my return from the Labyrinth.” To Alsimir he said, “Go, summon my lord Divvis: tell him there must be a session of the Council of Regency at once, and I await him.” Then he turned to the others and said, “I have committed a grave discourtesy, my lords, in the first excitement of speaking here with you. For I have left this good woman to stand unintroduced, and that is not proper. This is the lady Elsinome, my mother, who for the first time in her life beholds the world that lies beyond the Labyrinth.”

“My lords,” she said, with color coming to her cheeks, but her face otherwise betraying no confusion, no embarrassment.

“The lord Stasilaine—Prince Mirigant—Duke Elzandir of Chorg—”

Each in turn saluted her with the highest respect, almost as though she were the Lady herself. And she received those salutes with a poise and presence that sent shivers of the most extreme delight through Hissune.

“Let my mother be taken,” he said, “to the Pavilion of Lady Thiin, and given a suite worthy of some great hierarch of the Isle. I will join the rest of you in the council-chamber in an hour.”

“An hour is not sufficient time for the lord Divvis to return from his hunt,” said Mirigant mildly.

Hissune nodded. “So I comprehend. But it is not my fault that the Lord Divvis has chosen this day to go to the forest; and there is so much that needs to be said and done that I think we must begin before he arrives. My lord Stasilaine, will you concur with me in that?”

“Most surely.”

“Then two of the three Regents are in agreement. It is sufficient to convene. My lords, the council-chamber in an hour?”

They were all there when Hissune, cleansed and in fresh robes, entered the hall fifty minutes later. Taking his seat at the high table beside Stasilaine, he glanced about at the assembled princes and said, “I have spoken with Hornkast, and I have beheld the Pontifex Tyeveras with my own eyes.”

There was a stirring in the room, a gathering of tension.

Hissune said, “The Pontifex still lives. But it is not life as you or I understand it. He no longer speaks, even in such howls and shrieks as have been his recent language. He lives in another realm, far away, and I think it is the realm that lies just on this side of the Bridge of Farewells.”

“And how soon, then, is he likely to die?” asked Nimian of Dundilmir.

“Oh, not soon, even now,” replied Hissune. “They have their witcheries that can keep him for some years yet, I think, from making his crossing. But I believe that that crossing cannot now be much longer allowed to wait.”

“It is Lord Valentine’s decision to make,” said the Duke of Halanx.

Hissune nodded. “Indeed. I will come to that in a little while.” He rose and walked to the world-map, and laid his hand over the heart of Zimroel. “While traveling to and from the Labyrinth I received the regular dispatches. I know of the declaration of war against us made by the Piurivar Faraataa, whoever he may be; and I know that the Metamorphs now have begun to launch not only agricultural plagues into Zimroel but also a horde of ghastly new animals that create terrible havoc and fear. I am aware of the famine in the Khyntor district, the secession of Piliplok, the rioting in Ni-moya. I am not aware of what is taking place west of Dulorn, and I think no one is, this side of the Rift. I know also that western Alhanroel is rapidly approaching the chaotic condition of the other continent, and that the disruptions are heading swiftly eastward, even to the foothills of the Mount. In the face of all this we have done very little of a concrete nature so far. The central government appears to have vanished entirely, the provincial dukes are behaving as though they are altogether independent of one another, and we remain gathered on Castle Mount high above the clouds.”

“And what do you propose?” Mirigant asked.

“Several things. First, the raising of an army to occupy the borders of Piurifayne, to seal the province off, and to penetrate the jungle in search of Faraataa and his followers, which I grant you will be no easy quest.”

“And who will command this army?” said the Duke of Halanx.

“Permit me to return to that in a moment,” Hissune said. “To continue: we must have a second army, also to be organized in Zimroel, to occupy Piliplok—peacefully, if possible, otherwise by force—and restore it to its allegiance to the central government. Third, we must call a general conclave of all provincial rulers to discuss a rational allocation of food supplies, with the provinces not yet afflicted sharing what they have with those suffering from famine—making it clear, of course, that we are calling for sacrifice but not an intolerable sacrifice. Those provinces unwilling to share, if there are any, will face military occupation.”

“A great many armies,” said Manganot, “for a society that has so little in the way of a military tradition.”

“When armies have been needed,” Hissune replied, “we have been able to raise them somehow. This was true in Lord Stiamot’s time, and again during Lord Valentine’s war of restoration, and it will be the case again now, since we have no choice. I point out, though, that several informal armies already exist, under the leadership of the various self-proclaimed new Coronals. We can make use of those armies, and of the new Coronals themselves.”

“Make use of traitors?” the Duke of Halanx cried.

“Of anyone who can be of use,” said Hissune. “We will invite them to join us; we will give them high rank, though not, I trust, the rank to which they have appointed themselves; and we will make it clear to them that if they do not cooperate, we will destroy them.”

“Destroy?” Stasilaine said.

“It was the word I meant to use.”

“Even Dominin Barjazid was pardoned and sent to his brothers. To take life, even the life of a traitor—”

“Is no trifling matter,” said Hissune. “I mean to use these men, not to kill them. But I think we will have to kill them if they will not let themselves be used. I beg you, though, let us consider this point another time.”

“You mean to use these men?” Prince Nimian of Dundilmir said. “You speak much like a Coronal!”

“No,” Hissune said. “I speak like one of the two from whom the choice, by your own earlier agreement, is to be made. And in the unfortunate absence of my lord Divvis I speak perhaps too forcefully. But I tell you this, that I have given long thought to these plans, and I see no alternative to adopting them, no matter who is to rule.”

“Lord Valentine rules,” said the Duke of Halanx.

“As Coronal,” said Hissune. “But I think we are agreed that in the present crisis we must have a true Pontifex to guide us, as well as a Coronal. Lord Valentine, so you tell me, is sailing to the Isle to meet with the Lady. I propose to make the same journey, and speak with the Coronal, and attempt to convince him of the importance of ascending to the Pontificate. If he sees the wisdom of my arguments, he will then convey his wishes in the matter of a successor. The new Coronal, I think, must take up the task of pacifying Piliplok and Ni-moya, and of winning over the allegiance of the false Coronals. The other of us, I suggest, should have command of the army that will invade the Metamorph lands. For my part it makes no difference to me which it is to wear the crown, Divvis or I, but it is essential that we take the field at once and begin the restoration of order, which is already long overdue.”

“And shall we toss a royal-piece for it?” came a voice suddenly from the doorway.

Divvis, sweaty-looking and unshaven and still in his hunting clothes, stood facing Hissune.

Hissune smiled. “I am cheered to see you once again, my lord Divvis.”

“I regret that I have missed so much of this meeting. Are we forming armies and choosing Coronals today, Prince Hissune?”

“Lord Valentine must choose the Coronal,” Hissune replied calmly. “To you and me, after that, will fall the task of forming the armies and leading them. And it will be a while, I think, before either of us again has the leisure for such pastimes as hunting, my lord.” He indicated the vacant chair beside him at the high table. “Will you sit, my lord Divvis? I have made some proposals before this meeting, which I will repeat to you, if you will grant me a few moments for it. And then we must come to some decisions. So will you sit and listen to me, my lord Divvis? Will you sit?”

4

Once more, then, to sea: through heat-haze and swelter, with the fiery wind out of Suvrael at his back and a swift unceasing current from the southwest pushing the ships swiftly toward northern lands. Valentine felt other currents, turbulent ones, sweeping through his soul. The words of the high spokesman Hornkast at the banquet in the Labyrinth still resounded in him, as though he had heard them only yesterday, and not what seemed like ten thousand years ago.

The Coronal is the embodiment of Majipoor. The Coronal is Majipoor personified. He is the world; the world is the Coronal.

Yes. Yes.

And as he moved back and forth upon the face of the world, from Castle Mount to the Labyrinth, from the Labyrinth to the Isle, from the Isle to Piliplok to Piurifayne to Bellatule, from Bellatule to Suvrael—now from Suvrael again to the Isle—Valentine’s spirit opened ever more widely to the anguish of Majipoor, his mind grew ever more receptive to the pain, the confusion, the madness, the horror, that now was ripping apart what had been the happiest and most peaceful of worlds. Night and day was he flooded with the outpourings of twenty billion tormented souls. And gladly did he receive it all; and eagerly did he accept and absorb all that Majipoor must pour into him; and willingly did he search for ways of easing that pain. But the strain was wearying him. Too much came flooding in; he could not process and integrate it all, and often it baffled and overwhelmed him; and there was no escaping from it, for he was a Power of the realm, and this was his task, which could not be refused.

All this afternoon he had stood by himself on the deck, staring straight ahead, and no one dared approach him, not even Carabella, so complete was the sphere of isolation in which he had enclosed himself. When after a time she did go to him, hesitantly, timidly, it was in silence. He smiled and drew her close, her hip against his thigh, her shoulder against the pit of his arm, but still he did not speak, for he had passed for the moment into a realm beyond words, where he was calm, where the eroded places of his spirit might begin to heal somewhat. He knew he could trust her not to intrude on that.

After a long while she glanced off to the west, and caught her breath sharply in surprise. But still she did not speak.

He said, as though from far away, “What is it you see, love?”

“A shape out there. A dragon shape, I think.”

He made no reply.

She said, “Can it be possible, Valentine? They told us there wouldn’t be any dragons in these waters at this time of year. But what is it I see, then?”

“You see a dragon.”

“They said there wouldn’t be any. But I’m sure of it. Something dark. Something large. Swimming in the same direction we’re going. Valentine, how can there be a dragon here?”

“Dragons are everywhere, Carabella.”

“Am I imagining it? Perhaps it’s only a shadow on the water—a drifting mass of seaweed, maybe—”

He shook his head. “You see a dragon. A king-dragon, one of the great ones.”

“You say that without even looking, Valentine.”

“Yes. But the dragon is there.”

“You sense it?”

“I sense it, yes. That great heavy dragon-presence. The strength of its mind. That powerful intelligence. I sensed it before you said anything.”

“You sense so many things, now,” she said.

“Too many,” said Valentine.

He continued to look northward. The vast soul of the dragon lay like a weight upon his. His sensitivity had grown during these months of stress; he was able now to send his mind forth with scarcely an effort, indeed could scarcely keep himself from doing so. Awake or asleep, he roved deep into the soul of the world. Distance no longer seemed to be a barrier. He sensed everything, even the harsh bitter thoughts of the Shapeshifters, even the slow throbbing emanations of the sea dragons.

Carabella said, “What does the dragon want? Is it going to attack us, Valentine?”

“I doubt it.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“I’m not sure of anything, Carabella.”

He reached toward the great beast in the sea. He strived to touch its mind with his. For an instant there was something like contact—a sense of opening, a sense of joining. Then he was brushed aside as though by a mighty hand, but not disdainfully, not contemptuously. It was as though the dragon were saying, Not now, not here, not yet.

“You look so strange,” she said. “Will the dragon attack?”

“No. No.”

“You seem frightened.”

“Not frightened, no. I’m simply trying to understand. But I feel no danger. Only watchfulness—surveillance—that powerful mind, keeping watch over us—”

“Sending reports on us to the Shapeshifters, perhaps?”

“That may be, I suppose.”

“If the dragons and the Shapeshifters are in alliance against us—”

“So Deliamber suspects, on the evidence of someone who is no longer available for questioning. I think it may be more complex than that. I think we will be a long time understanding what it is that links the Shapeshifters and the sea dragons. But I tell you, I feel no danger.”

She was silent a moment, staring at him.

“You can actually read the dragon’s mind?”

“No. No. I feel the dragon’s mind. The presence of it. I can read nothing. The dragon is a mystery to me, Carabella. The harder I strive to reach it, the more easily it deflects me.”

“It’s turning. It’s beginning to swim away from us.”

“Yes. I can feel it closing its mind to me—pulling back, shutting me out.”

“What did it want, Valentine? What did it learn?”

“I wish I knew,” he said.

He clung tightly to the rail, drained, shaking. Carabella put her hand over his a moment, and squeezed it; and then she moved away and they were silent again.

He did not understand. He understood so very little. And he knew it was essential that he understand. He was the one through which this turmoil in the world might be resolved, and reunion accomplished: of that he was sure. He, only he, could bring the warring forces together into harmony. But how? How?

When, years ago, his brother’s death had unexpectedly made him a king, he had taken on that burden without a murmur, giving himself over fully to it though often the kingship felt to him like a chariot that was pulling him mercilessly along behind it. But at least he had had the training a king must have. Now, so it was beginning to seem, Majipoor was demanding of him that he become a god; and he had had no training at all for that.

He sensed the dragon still there, somewhere not far away. But he could make no real contact; and after a time he abandoned the attempt. He stood until dusk, peering to the north as though he expected to see the Isle of the Lady shining like a beacon in the darkness.

But the Isle was still some days’ journey away. They were only now passing the latitude of the great peninsula known as the Stoienzar. The sea-road from Tolaghai to the Isle cut sharply across the Inner Sea almost to Alhanroel—to the Stoienzar’s tip, practically—and then angled up the back face of the Rodamaunt Archipelago to Numinor port. Such a route took fullest advantage of the prevailing wind from the south, and of the strong Rodamaunt Current: it was far quicker to sail from Suvrael to the Isle than from the Isle to Suvrael.

That evening there was much discussion of the dragon. In winter these waters normally abounded with them, for the dragons that had survived the autumn hunting season customarily proceeded past the Stoienzar coast on their eastward journey back to the Great Sea. But this was not winter; and, as Valentine and the others had already had the opportunity to observe, the dragons had taken a strange route this year, veering northward past the western coast of the Isle toward some mysterious rendezvous in the polar seas. But these days, though, there were dragons everywhere in the sea, or so it seemed, and who knew why? Not I, Valentine thought. Certainly not I.

He sat quietly among his friends, saying little, gathering his strength, replenishing himself.

In the night, lying awake with Carabella at his side, he listened to the voices of Majipoor. He heard them crying with hunger in Khyntor and whimpering with fear in Pidruid; he heard the angry shouts of vigilante forces running through the cobbled streets of Velathys, and the barking outbursts of street-corner orators in Alaisor. He heard his name called out, fifty million times. He heard the Metamorphs in their humid jungle savoring the triumph that was sure to come, and he heard the dragons calling to one another in great solemn tones on the floor of the sea.

And also he felt the cool touch of his mother’s hand across his brow, and the Lady saying, “You will be with me soon, Valentine, and I will give you ease.” And then the King of Dreams was with him to declare, “This night will I traverse the world seeking your enemies, friend Coronal, and if I can bring them to their knees, why, that I mean to do;” Which gave him some repose, until the cries of dismay and pain began again, and then the singing of the sea-dragons, and then the whispering of the Shapeshifters; and so the night became morning, and he rose from his bed more weary than when he had entered it.

But once the ships had passed the tip of the Stoienzar and entered into the waters between Alhanroel and the Isle, Valentine’s malaise began to lift. The bombardment of anguish from every part of the world did not cease; but here the power of the Lady was paramount and grew daily stronger, and Valentine felt her beside him in his mind, aiding, guiding, comforting. In Suvrael, confronted with the pessimism of the King of Dreams, he had spoken eloquently of his conviction that the world could be restored. “There is no hope,” said Minax Barjazid, to which Valentine replied, “There is, if only we reach out to seize it. I see the way.” And the Barjazid said, “There is no way, and all is lost,” to which Valentine replied, “Only follow me, and I will show the way.” And eventually he had pulled Minax from his bleakness and won his grudging support. That shard of hope that Valentine had found in Suvrael had somehow slipped from his grasp during this voyage north; but again it seemed to be returning.

Now the Isle was very close. Now each day it stood higher above the horizon, and every morning, as the rising sun struck its eastern face, its chalky ramparts offered a brilliant display, pale pink in the first light, then a stunning scarlet that gave way imperceptibly to gold, and then at last, when the sun was fully aloft, the splendor of total whiteness, a whiteness that rang out across the waters like the clashing of giant cymbals and the upsurge of a vast sustained melody.

In Numinor port the Lady was waiting for him at the house known as the Seven Walls. Once more the hierarch Talinot Esulde conducted Valentine to her in the Emerald Room; once more he found her standing between the potted tanigale trees, smiling, her arms outstretched to him.

But startling and dismaying changes had occurred in her, he saw, since that other time, not a year ago, when they had met in this room. Her dark hair was shot through, now, with strands of white; the warm gleam of her eyes had turned dull and almost chilly; and time was making inroads now even on her regal bearing, rounding her shoulders, pulling her head down closer to them and thrusting it forward. She had seemed to him a goddess once; now she seemed a goddess being transformed gradually into an old woman, very much mortal.

They embraced. She seemed to have grown so light that the merest vagrant gust would carry her away. They drank a cool golden wine together, and he told her of his wanderings in Piurifayne, of his voyage to Suvrael, of his meeting with Dominin Barjazid, and of the pleasure it had given him to see his old enemy restored to his right mind and proper allegiance.

“And the King of Dreams?” she asked. “Was he cordial?”

“To the utmost. There was great warmth between us, which surprised me.”

“The Barjazids are rarely lovable. The nature of their life in that land, and of their dread responsibilities, prevents it, I suppose. But they are not the monsters that they are popularly thought to be. This Minax is a fierce man—I feel it in his soul, when our minds meet, which is not often—but a strong and virtuous one.”

“He views the future bleakly, but he has pledged his fullest support to all that we must do. At this moment he lashes the world with his most potent sendings, in the hope of bringing the madness into check.”

“So I am aware,” said the Lady. “These weeks past I have felt the power of him flooding out of Suvrael, as it has never come before. He has launched a mighty effort. As have I, in my quieter way. But it will not be enough. The world has gone mad, Valentine. Our enemies’ star ascends, and ours wanes, and hunger and fear rule the world now, not Pontifex and Coronal. You know that. You feel the madness pressing upon you, engulfing you, threatening to sweep everything away.”

“Then we will fail, mother? Is that what you’re saying? You, the fountain of hope, the bringer of comfort?”

Some of the old steely mettle returned to her eyes. “I said nothing of failure. I said only that the King of Dreams and Lady of the Isle are not of themselves able to stem the torrent of insanity.”

“There is a third power, mother. Or do you think I am incapable of waging this war?”

“You are capable of anything you wish to achieve, Valentine. But even three Powers are not enough. A lame government cannot meet a crisis such as afflicts us now.”

“Lame?”

“It stands on three legs. There should be four. It is time for old Tyeveras to sleep.”

“Mother—”

“How long can you evade your responsibility?”

“I evade nothing, mother! But if I bottle myself up in the Labyrinth, what purpose will that achieve?”

“Do you think a Pontifex is useless? How strange a view of our commonwealth you must have, if you think that.”

“I understand the value of the Pontifex.”

“Yet you have ruled without one throughout your whole reign.”

“It was not my fault that Tyeveras was senile when I came to the throne. What was I to do, go on to the Labyrinth immediately upon becoming Coronal? I had no Pontifex because I was not given one. And the time was not right for me to take Tyeveras’s place. I had work of a more visible kind to do. I still have.”

“You owe Majipoor a Pontifex, Valentine.”

“Not yet. Not yet.”

“How long will you say that?”

“I must remain in sight. I mean to make contact with the Danipiur somehow, mother, and bring her into a league with me against this Faraataa, our enemy, who will wreck all the world in the name of regaining it for his people. If I am in the Labyrinth, how can I—”

“Do you mean you will go to Piurifayne a second time?”

“That would only fail a second time. All the same, I see it as essential that I negotiate with the Metamorphs. The Danipiur must comprehend that I am not like the kings of the past, that I recognize new truths. That I believe we can no longer repress the Metamorph in the soul of Majipoor, but must recognize it, and admit it to our midst, and incorporate it in us all.”

“And this can only be done while you are Coronal?”

“So I am convinced, mother.”

“Examine your convictions again, then,” said the Lady, in an inexorable voice. “If indeed they are convictions, and not merely a loathing for the Labyrinth.”

“I detest the Labyrinth, and make no secret of it. But I will go to it, obediently if not gladly, when the time comes. I say the time is not yet at hand. It may be close, but it is not yet here.”

“May it not be long in coming, then. Let Tyeveras sleep at last, Valentine. And let it be soon.”

5

It was a small triumph, Faraataa thought, but one well worth savoring, this summons to meet with the Danipiur. So many years an outcast, flitting miserably through the jungle, so many years of being mocked when he was not being ignored; and now the Danipiur had with the greatest of diplomatic courtesy invited him to attend her at the House of Offices in Ilirivoyne.

He had been tempted at first to reverse the invitation, and tell her loftily to come to him in New Velalisier. After all, she was a mere tribal functionary whose title had no pre-Exile pedigree, and he, by the acclamation of multitudes, was the Prince To Come and the King That Is, who spoke daily with water-kings and commanded loyalties far more intense than any the Danipiur could claim. But then he reconsidered: how much more effective it would be, he told himself, to march at the head of his thousands into Ilirivoyne, and let the Danipiur and all her flunkeys see what power he held! So be it, he thought. He agreed to go to Ilirivoyne.

The capital in its newest site still had a raw, incomplete look. They had as usual chosen an open place in the forest for it, with an ample stream nearby. But the streets were mere hazy paths, the wicker houses had little ornamentation and their roofs looked hastily woven, and the plaza in front of the House of Offices was only partially cleared, with vines still snaking and tangling everywhere. Only the House of Offices itself afforded any connection with the former Ilirivoyne. As was the custom, they had carried the building with them from the old site, and reerected it at the center of town, where it dominated everything: three stories high, fashioned of gleaming poles of bannikop with polished planks of swamp mahogany for its facade, it stood out above the crude huts of the Piurivars of Ilirivoyne like a palace. But when we cross the sea and restore Velalisier, Faraataa thought, we will build a true palace out of marble and slate that will be the new wonder of the world, and we will decorate it with the fine things that we will take as booty from Lord Valentine’s Castle. And then let the Danipiur humble herself before me!

But for now he meant to observe the protocols. He presented himself before the House of Offices and shifted himself through the five Changes of Obeisance: the Wind, the Sands, the Blade, the Flow, the Flame. He held himself in the Fifth of the Changes until the Danipiur appeared. She seemed startled, for the barest brief moment, by the size of the force that had accompanied him to the capital: it filled the plaza and spread out beyond the borders of the city. But she recovered her poise swiftly and welcomed him with the three Changes of Acceptance: the Star, the Moon, the Comet. On that last, Faraataa reverted to his own form, and followed her into the building. Never before had he entered the House of Offices.

The Danipiur was cool, remote, proper. Faraataa felt the merest flicker of awe—she had held her office during the entire span of his life, after all—but quickly he mastered it. Her lofty style, her supreme self-possession, were, he knew, mere weapons of defense.

She offered him a meal of calimbots and ghumba, and to drink gave him a pale lavender wine, which he eyed with displeasure, wine not being a beverage that had been used among the Piurivars in the ancient times. He would not drink it or even raise it in a salute, which did not pass unnoticed.

When the formalities were done the Danipiur said brusquely to him, “I love the Unchanging Ones no more than you do, Faraataa. But what you seek is unattainable.”

“And what is it that I seek, then?”

“To rid the world of them.”

“You think this is unattainable?” he said, a tone of delicate curiosity in his voice. “Why is that?”

“There are twenty billion of them. Where are they to go?”…

“Are there no other worlds in the universe? They came from them: let them return.”

She touched her fingertips to her chin: a negative gesture carrying with it amusement and disdain for his words. Faraataa refused to let it irritate him.

“When they came,” said the Danipiur, “they were very few. Now they are many, and there is little travel in these times between Majipoor and other worlds. Do you understand how long it would take to transport twenty billion people from this planet? If a ship departed every hour carrying ten thousand of them, I think we would never be rid of them all, for they must breed faster than the ships could be loaded.”

“Then let them stay here, and we will continue to wage war against them. And they will kill one another for food, and after a time there will be no food and the ones who remain will starve to death, and their cities will become ghost places. And we will be done with them forever.”

Again the fingertips to the chin. “Twenty billion dead bodies? Faraataa, Faraataa, be sensible! Can you comprehend what that means? There are many more people in Ni-moya alone than in all of Piurifayne—and how many other cities are there? Think of the stench of all those bodies! Think of the diseases of corruption let loose by so much rotting flesh!”

“It will be very sparse flesh, if they all have starved to death. There will not be so much to rot.”

“You speak too frivolously, Faraataa.”

“Do I? Well, then, I speak frivolously. In my frivolous way I have shattered an oppressor under whose heel we have writhed for fourteen thousand years. Frivolously I have hurled them into chaos. Frivolously I—”

“Faraataa!”

“I have achieved much in my frivolous way, Danipiur. Not only without any aid from you, but in fact with your direct opposition much of the time. And now—”

“Attend me, Faraataa! You have set loose mighty forces, yes, and you have shaken the Unchanging Ones in a way that I did not think possible. But the time has come now for you to pause and give some thought to the ultimate consequences of what you have done.”

“I have,” he replied. “We will regain our world.”

“Perhaps. But at what a cost! You have sent blights out into their lands—can those blights be so easily called back, do you think? You have devised monstrous and frightful new animals and turned them loose. And now you propose to let the world be choked by the decaying corpses of billions of people. Are you saving our world, Faraataa, or destroying it?”

“The blights will disappear when the crops they feed on, which are mainly not anything of any use to us, have perished. The new animals are few and the world is large, and the scientists assure me that they are unable to reproduce themselves, so we will be rid of them once their work is done. And I am less fearful of those decaying corpses than you. The scavenger birds will feed as they have never fed before, and we will build temples out of the mounds of bones that remain. Victory is ours, Danipiur. The world has been regained.”

“You are too confident. They have not yet begun to strike back at us—but what if they do, Faraataa, what if they do? I ask you to remember, Faraataa, what Lord Stiamot accomplished against us.”

“Lord Stiamot needed thirty years to complete his conquest.”

“Yes,” said the Danipiur, “but his armies were small. Now the Unchanging Ones outnumber us greatly.”

“And now we have the art of sending plagues and monsters against them, which we did not have in Lord Stiamot’s time. Their very numbers will work in their disfavor, once their food supplies run out. How can they fight us for thirty days, let alone thirty years, with famine pulling their civilization apart?”

“Hungry warriors may fight much more fiercely than plump ones.”

Faraataa laughed. “Warriors? What warriors? You speak absurdities, Danipiur. These people are soft.”

“In Lord Stiamot’s day—”

“Lord Stiamot’s day was eight thousand years ago. Life has been very easy for them ever since, and they have become a race of simpletons and cowards. And the biggest simpleton of all is this Lord Valentine of theirs, this holy fool, with his pious abhorrence of violence. What do we have to fear from such a king as that, who has no stomach for slaughter?”

“Agreed: we have nothing to fear from him. But we can use him, Faraataa. And that is what I mean to do.”

“In what way?”

“You know that it is his dream to come to terms with us.”

“I know,” said Faraataa, “that he entered Piurifayne foolishly hoping to negotiate with you in some way, and that you wisely avoided seeing him.”

“He came seeking friendship, yes. And yes, I avoided him. I needed to learn more about your intentions before I could enter into any dealings with him.”

“You know my intentions now.”

“I do. And I ask you to cease spreading these plagues, and to give me your support when I meet with the Coronal. Your actions threaten my purposes.”

“Which are?”

“Lord Valentine is different from the other Coronals I have known. As you say, he is a holy fool: a gentle man, with no stomach for slaughter. His loathing of warfare makes him pliant and manipulable. I mean to win from him such concessions as no previous Coronal would grant us. The right to settle once again in Alhanroel—possession once more of the sacred city Velalisier—a voice in the government—complete political equality, in short, within the framework of Majipoori life.”

“Better to destroy the framework entirely, and settle where we choose without asking leave of anyone!”

“But you must see that that is impossible. You can neither evict twenty billion people from this planet nor exterminate them. What we can do is to make peace with them. And in Valentine lies our opportunity for peace, Faraataa.”

“Peace! What a foul lying word that is! Peace! Oh, no, Danipiur, I want no peace. I am interested not in peace but in victory. And victory will be ours.”

“The victory you crave will be the doom of us all,” the Danipiur retorted.

“I think not. And I think your negotiations with the Coronal will lead you nowhere. If he grants such concessions as you mean to ask, his own princes and dukes will overthrow him and replace him with a more ruthless man, and then where will we be? No, Danipiur, I must continue my war until the Unchanging Ones have vanished entirely from our world. Anything short of that means our continued enslavement.”

“I forbid it.”

“Forbid?”

“I am the Danipiur!”

“So you are. But what is that? I am the King That Is, of whom the prophecies spoke. How can you forbid me anything? The Unchanging Ones themselves tremble before me. I will destroy them, Danipiur. And if you oppose me, I will destroy you as well.” He rose, and with a sweep of his hand he knocked aside his untouched wine-bowl, spilling its contents across the table. At the door he paused and looked back, and briefly allowed his shape to flicker into the form known as the River, a gesture of defiance and contempt. Then he resumed his own form. “The war will continue,” he said.

“For the time being I permit you to retain your office, but I warn you to make no treasonous approaches to the enemy. As for the holy Lord Valentine, his life is forfeit to me. His blood will serve to cleanse the Tables of the Gods on the day of the rededication of Velalisier. Be wary, Danipiur. Or I will use yours for the same purpose.”

6

“The Coronal Lord Valentine is with his mother the Lady at Inner Temple,” said the hierarch Talinot Esulde. “He asks you to rest here this night at the royal lodging-place in Numinor, Prince Hissune, and to begin your journey toward him in the morning.”

“As the Coronal wishes,” said Hissune.

He stared past the hierarch at the vast white wall of First Cliff rising above Numinor. It was dazzling in its brightness, almost painfully so, nearly as brilliant as the sun itself. When the Isle first had come into view some days before on the voyage from Alhanroel, he had found himself shading his eyes against that powerful white glare and wanting to look away altogether, and Elsinome, standing beside him, had turned in terror from it, crying, “I have never seen anything so bright! Will it blind us to look at it?” But now, at close range, the white stone was less frightening: its light seemed pure, soothing, the light of a moon rather than of a sun.

A cool sweet breeze blew from the sea, the same breeze that had carried him so swiftly—but not nearly swiftly enough to still the impatience that day after day mounted and surged in him—from Alaisor to the Isle. That impatience still rode him now that he had arrived in the Lady’s domain. But yet he knew he must be patient, and adapt himself to the unhurried rhythms of the Isle and its serene mistress, or he might never be able to accomplish the things he had come here to accomplish.

And indeed he felt those gentle rhythms settling over him as he was conducted by the hierarchs through the small quiet harbor town to the royal lodging known as the Seven Walls. The spell of the Isle, he thought, was irresistible: it was such a tranquil place, serene, peaceful, testifying in every aspect of itself to the presence of the Lady. The turmoil now wracking Majipoor seemed unreal to him here.

That night, though, Hissune found it far from easy to get to sleep. He lay in a magnificent chamber hung with splendid dark-hued fabrics of an antique weave, where, for all he knew, the great Lord Confalume had slept before him, or Prestimion, or Stiamot himself; and it seemed to him that those ancient kings still hovered nearby, speaking to one another in low whispers, and what they were saying was in mockery of him: upstart, popinjay, peacock. It is only the sound of the surf against the rampart below, he told himself angrily. But still sleep would not come, and the harder he sought it the wider awake he became. He rose and walked from room to room, and out into the courtyard, thinking to rouse some servitor who might give him wine; but he found no one about, and after a time he returned to his room and closed his eyes once again. This time he thought he felt the Lady lightly touch his soul, almost at once: not a sending, nothing like that, merely a contact delicate as a breath across his soul, a soft Hissune, Hissune, Hissune, which calmed him into a light sleep and then into a deeper one beyond the reach of dreams.

In the morning the slender and stately hierarch Talinot Esulde came for him and for Elsinome, and led them to a place at the foot of the great white cliff, where floater sleds were waiting to carry them to the high terraces of the Isle.

The ascent of the vertical face of First Cliff was awesome: up and up and up, as though in a dream. Hissune did not dare open his eyes until the sled had come to rest in its landing pad. Then he looked back, and saw the sun-streaked expanse of the sea stretching off to distant Alhanroel, and the twin curving arms of the Numinor breakwater jutting out into it directly below him. A floater-wagon took them across the heavily wooded tableland atop the cliff to the base of Second Cliff, which sprang upward so steeply it seemed to fill all the sky; and there they rested for the night in a lodge at a place called the Terrace of Mirrors, where massive slabs of polished black stone rose like mysterious ancient idols from the ground.

Thence it was upward once more by sled to the highest and innermost cliff, thousands of feet above sea level, that was the sanctuary of the Lady. Atop Third Cliff the air was startlingly clear, so that objects many miles away stood out as though magnified in a glass. Great birds of a kind unknown to Hissune, with plump red bodies and enormous black wings, circled in lazy spirals far overhead. Again Hissune and Elsinome traveled inward over the Isle’s flat summit, past terrace after terrace, until at last they halted at a place where simple buildings of whitewashed stone were scattered in seeming randomness amidst gardens of a surpassing serenity.

“This is the Terrace of Adoration,” said Talinot Esulde. “The gateway to Inner Temple.”

They slept that night in a quiet secluded lodge, pleasant and unpretentious, with its own shimmering pool and a quiet, intimate garden bordered by vines whose thick ancient trunks were woven into an impenetrable wall. At dawn, servitors brought them chilled fruits and grilled fish; and soon after they had eaten, Talinot Esulde appeared. With her was a second hierarch, a formidable, keen-eyed, white-haired woman. She greeted them each in a very different way: offering Hissune the salute befitting a prince of the Mount, but doing it in a strangely casual, almost perfunctory manner, and then turning to Elsinome and clasping both of her hands in her own, and holding them a long moment, staring warmly and intently into her eyes. When at last she released Elsinome she said, “I bid you both welcome to Third Cliff. I am Lorivade. The Lady and her son await you.

The morning was cool and misty, with a hint of sunlight about to break through the low clouds. In single file, with Lorivade leading and Talinot Esulde to the rear, no one uttering a word, they passed through a garden where every leaf was shimmering with dew-sparkles, and crossed a bridge of white stone, so delicately arched that it seemed it might shatter at the most gentle of footfalls, into a broad grassy field, at the far end of which lay Inner Temple.

Hissune had never seen a building more lovely. It was constructed of the same translucent white stone as the bridge. At its heart was a low flat-roofed rotunda, from which eight long, slender, equidistant wings radiated like starbeams. There was no ornamentation: everything was clean, chaste, simple, flawless.

Within the rotunda, an airy eight-sided room with an octagonal pool at its center, Lord Valentine and a woman who was surely his mother the Lady were waiting for them.

Hissune halted at the threshold, frozen, overcome by bewilderment. He looked from one to the other in confusion, not knowing to which of these Powers he should offer the first obeisance. The Lady, he decided, must take precedence. But in what form should he pay his homage? He knew the sign of the Lady, of course, but did one make that sign to the Lady herself, as one made the starburst sign to the Coronal, or was that hopelessly gauche? Hissune had no idea. Nothing in his training had prepared him for meeting the Lady of the Isle.

He turned to her, nevertheless. She was much older than he had expected her to be, face deeply furrowed, hair streaked with white, eyes encircled by an intricate network of fine lines. But her smile, intense and warm and radiant as the midday sun, spoke eloquently of the vigor and force that still were hers: in that astonishing glow Hissune felt his doubts and fears swiftly melting away.

He would have knelt to her, but she seemed to sense what he intended before he could make the gesture, and halted him with a quick little shake of her head. Instead the Lady held forth her hand to him. Hissune, somehow comprehending what was expected of him, lightly touched the tips of his fingers to hers for an instant, and took from her a startling, tingling inrush of energy that might have caused him to leap back if he had not been holding himself under such taut control. But from that unexpected current he found himself gaining a surge of renewed assurance, strength, poise.

Then he turned to the Coronal.

“My lord,” he whispered.

Hissune was astonished and dismayed by the alteration in Lord Valentine’s appearance since he last had seen the Coronal, so very long ago in the Labyrinth, at the beginning of his ill-starred grand processional. Then Lord Valentine had been in the grip of terrible fatigue, but even so his features had displayed an inner light, a certain irrepressible joyousness, that no weariness could altogether dispel. Not now. The cruel sun of Suvrael had darkened his skin and bleached his hair, giving him a strangely fierce, almost barbaric look. His eyes were deep and hooded, his face was gaunt and lined, there was no trace whatever of that amiable sunniness of spirit that was his most visible trait of character. He seemed altogether unfamiliar: somber, tense, remote.

Hissune began to offer the starburst sign. But Lord Valentine brushed it away impatiently and, reaching forward, seized Hissune’s hand, gripping it tightly a moment. That too was unsettling. One did not shake hands with Coronals. And at the contact of their hands Hissune again felt a current flowing into him: but this energy, unlike that which had come from the Lady, left him disturbed, jangled, ill at ease.

When the Coronal released him Hissune stepped back and beckoned to Elsinome, who was standing immobile by the threshold as though she had been turned to stone by the sight of two Powers of Majipoor in the same room. In a thick, hoarse voice he said, “My lord—good Lady—I pray you welcome my mother, the lady Elsinome—”

“A worthy mother for so worthy a son,” said the Lady: the first words she had spoken, and her voice seemed to Hissune to be the finest he had ever heard: rich, calm, musical. “Come to me, Elsinome.”

Breaking from her trancelike state, Elsinome advanced across the smooth marble floor, and the Lady advanced also toward her, so that they met by the eight-sided pool at the room’s center. There the Lady took Elsinome in her arms, and embraced her closely and with great warmth; and when finally the two women parted, Hissune saw that his mother seemed like one who has for a long while been in darkness, and who now has emerged into the full brightness of the sun. Her eyes were shining, her face was flushed, there was no sign of timidity or awe about her.

She looked now toward Lord Valentine and began to make the starburst sign, only to have the Coronal reject it as he had from Hissune, holding out the palm of his hand to her and saying, “That is not necessary, good lady Elsinome.”

“My lord, it is my duty!” she replied in a firm voice.

“No. No longer.” The Coronal smiled for the first time that morning. “All that gesturing and bowing is stuff designed for public show. There’s no need of such pomp in here.”

To Hissune then he said, “I would not have recognized you, I think, had I not known it was you who was coming here today. We have been apart such a long time that we have become strangers, or so it feels to me.”

“Several years, my lord, and not easy years,” Hissune replied. “Time always works changes, and years like these work great changes.”

“So they do.” Leaning forward, Lord Valentine studied Hissune with an intensity that he found disconcerting. At length the Coronal said, “Once I thought that I knew you well. But the Hissune I knew was a boy who hid shyness behind slyness. The one who stands here today has become a man—a prince, even—and there is a little shyness left in him, but not much, and the slyness, I think, has turned into something deeper—craftiness, perhaps. Or even statesmanship, if the reports I have of you are true, and I would believe that they are. I think I still can see the boy I once knew, somewhere within you. But recognizing him is far from easy.”

“And it is hard for me, my lord, to see in you the man who hired me once to be his guide through the Labyrinth.”

“Am I changed that much, then, Hissune?”

“You are, my lord. I fear for you.”

“Fear for Majipoor, if you must fear. Waste none on me.”

“I do fear for Majipoor, and greatly. But how can you ask me not to fear for you? You are my benefactor, my lord. All I am I owe to you. And when I see you grown so bleak, so wintry—”

“These are wintry times, Hissune. The weather of the world is reflected on my face. But perhaps there is a springtime ahead for us all. Tell me: what is the news from Castle Mount? I know the lords and princes have been hatching great plans there.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“Speak, then!”

“You understand, my lord, that these schemes are put forth subject to your ratification, that the Council of Regency would not presume to undertake—”

“So I assume. Tell me what the Council proposes.”

Hissune drew his breath in deeply. “First,” he said, “we would situate an army encircling all borders of Piurifayne, so that we may prevent the Metamorphs from exporting any further plagues and other horrors.”

“To encircle Piurifayne, did you say, or to invade it?” asked Lord Valentine.

“Primarily to encircle it, my lord.”

“Primarily?”

“Once we have established control of the borders, the plan is to enter the province in search of the rebel Faraataa and his followers.”

“Ah. To capture Faraataa and his followers! And what will be done to them if they are captured, which I very much doubt they will be, considering my own experiences when I wandered in that jungle?”

“They will be confined.”

“Nothing more? No execution of ringleaders?”

“My lord, we are not savages!”

“Of course. Of course. And the aim of this invasion will be strictly to take Faraataa?”

“No more than that, my lord.”

“No attempt to overthrow the Danipiur? No campaign of general extermination of the Metamorphs?”

“Those ideas were never suggested.”

“I see.” His voice was curiously controlled, almost mocking: much unlike any tone Hissune had ever heard him use before. “And what other plans does the Council propose?”

“An army of pacification to occupy Piliplok—without bloodshed, if bloodshed can be avoided—and to take control of any other cities or provinces that may have seceded from the government. Also, neutralization of the various private armies established by the false Coronals now infesting many areas, and, if possible, the turning of those armies toward the service of the government. Finally, military occupation of any provinces that refuse to take part in a newly instituted program for sharing food supplies with afflicted zones.”

“Quite a comprehensive scheme,” Lord Valentine said, in that same odd detached tone. “And who will lead all these armies?”

“The Council has suggested dividing the command between my lord Divvis, my lord Tunigorn, and myself,” replied Hissune.

“And I?”

“You will of course have supreme command over all our forces, my lord.”

“Of course. Of course.” Lord Valentine’s gaze turned within, and for a long span of silence he appeared to be contemplating all that Hissune had said. Hissune watched him closely. There was something deeply troublesome about the Coronal’s austere, restrained manner of questioning him: it seemed clear that Lord Valentine knew as well as Hissune himself where the conversation was heading, and Hissune found himself dreading the moment when it must get there. But that moment, Hissune realized, was already at hand. The Coronal’s eyes brightened strangely as his attention turned once again toward Hissune, and he said, “Was anything else proposed by the Council of Regency, Prince Hissune?”

“One thing more, my lord.”

“Which is?”

“That the commander of the army that will occupy Piliplok and other rebellious cities should be one who bears the title of Coronal.”

“The Coronal, you have just told me, will be the supreme commander.”

“No, my lord. The Pontifex must be the supreme commander.”

The silence that followed seemed to endure for a thousand years. Lord Valentine stood almost motionless: he might have been a statue, but for the slight flickering of his eyelids and the occasional quiver of a muscle in his cheek. Hissune waited tensely, not daring to speak. Now that he had done it, he felt amazed at his own temerity in delivering such an ultimatum to the Coronal. But it was done. It could not be withdrawn. If Lord Valentine in his wrath were to strip him of his rank and send him back to beg in the streets of the Labyrinth, so be it: it was done, it could not be withdrawn.

The Coronal began to laugh.

It was a laughter that began somewhere deep within him and rose like a geyser through his chest to his lips: a great bellowing booming laugh, more the sort of sound that some giant like Lisamon Hultin or Zalzan Kavol might make than anything one would expect the gentle Lord Valentine to let loose. It went on and on, until Hissune began to fear that the Coronal had taken leave of his senses; but just then it ceased, swiftly and suddenly, and nothing remained of Lord Valentine’s bizarre mirth but a strange glittering smile.

“Well done!” he cried. “Ah, well done, Hissune, well done!”

“My lord?”

“And tell me, who is the new Coronal to be?”

“My lord, you must understand that these are only proposals—for the sake of the greater efficiency of the government in this time of crisis—”

“Yes, of course. And who, I ask you again, is to be brought forward in the name of greater efficiency?”

“My lord, the choice of a successor remains always with the former Coronal.”

“So it does. But the candidates—are they not proposed by the high counsellors and princes? Elidath was the heir presumptive—but Elidath, as I think you must know, is dead. So, then—who is it to be, Hissune?”

“Several names were discussed,” said Hissune softly. He could scarcely bear to look directly at Lord Valentine now. “If this is offensive to you, my lord—”

“Several names, yes. Whose?”

“My lord Stasilaine, for one. But he at once declared that he had no wish to be Coronal. My lord Divvis, for another—”

“Divvis must never be Coronal!” said Lord Valentine sharply, with a glance toward the Lady. “He has all the faults of my brother Voriax, and none of his merits. Except valor, I suppose, and a certain forcefulness. Which are insufficient.”

“There was one other name, my lord.”

“Yours, Hissune?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Hissune, but he could get the words out only in a choking whisper. “Mine.”

Lord Valentine smiled. “And would you serve?”

“If I were asked, my lord, yes. Yes.”

The Coronal’s eyes bore down intensely on Hissune’s, who withstood that fierce inquiry without flinching.

“Well, then, there is no problem, eh? My mother would have me ascend. The Council of Regency would have me ascend. Old Tyeveras surely would have me ascend.”

“Valentine—” said the Lady, frowning.

“No, all is well, mother. I understand what must be done. I can hesitate no longer, can I? Therefore I accept my destiny. We will send word to Hornkast that Tyeveras is to be permitted at last to cross the Bridge of Farewells. You, mother, you finally may put down your burden, as I know you wish to do, and retire to the ease of the life of a former Lady. You, Elsinome: your task is only beginning. And yours, Hissune. See, the thing is done. It is as I intended, only sooner, perhaps, than I had expected.” Hissune, watching the Coronal in astonishment and perplexity, saw the expression on his face shift: the harshness, the uncharacteristic ferocity, left his features, and into his eyes came the ease and warmth and gentleness of the Valentine he had once been, and that eerie rigid glittering smile, so close almost to a madman’s, was replaced by the old Valentine-smile, kind, tender, loving. “It is done,” said Valentine quietly. He raised his hands and held them forth in the starburst sign, and cried, “Long life to the Coronal! Long life to Lord Hissune!”

7

Three of the five great ministers of the Pontificate were already in the council-chamber when Hornkast entered. In the center, as usual, sat the Ghayrog Shinaam, minister of external affairs, his forked tongue flickering nervously, as though he believed that a death sentence was about to be passed not on the ancient creature he had served so long, but on himself. Beside him was the empty seat of the physician Sepulthrove, and to the right of that was Dilifon, that shriveled and palsied little man, sitting huddled in his thronelike chair, gripping its armrests for support; but his eyes were alive with a fire Hornkast had not seen in them for years. On the other side of the room was the dream-speaker Narrameer, radiating dark morbidity and terror from behind the absurdly voluptuous sorcery-induced beauty with which she cloaked her century-old body. How long, Hornkast wondered, had each of these three been awaiting this day? And what provision had they made in their souls for the time of its coming?

“Where is Sepulthrove?” Hornkast demanded.

“With the Pontifex,” said Dilifon. “He was summoned to the throne-room an hour ago. The Pontifex has begun to speak once more, so we have been told.”

“Strange that I was not notified,” said Hornkast.

“We knew that you were receiving a message from the Coronal,” Shinaam said. “We thought it best you not be disturbed.”

“This is the day, is it not?” Narrameer asked, leaning tensely forward, running her fingers again and again through her thick, lustrous black hair.

Hornkast nodded. “This is the day.”

“One can hardly believe it,” said Dilifon. “The farce has gone on so long it seemed it might never end!”

“It ends today,” said Hornkast. “Here is the decree. Quite elegantly phrased, in truth.”

Shinaam, with a thin rasping laugh, said, “I would like to know what sort of phrases one uses in condemning a reigning Pontifex to death. It is a document that will be much studied by future generations, I think.”

“The decree condemns no one to death,” said Hornkast. “It issues no instructions. It is merely a proclamation of the Coronal Lord Valentine’s grief upon the death of his father and the father of us all, the great Pontifex Tyeveras.”

“Ah, he is shrewder than I thought!” Dilifon said. “His hands remain clean!”

“They always do,” said Narrameer. “Tell me, Hornkast: who is the new Coronal to be?”

“Hissune son of Elsinome has been chosen.”

“The young prince out of the Labyrinth?”

“The same.”

“Amazing. And there is to be a new Lady, then?”

“Elsinome,” said Hornkast.

“This is a revolution!” cried Shinaam. “Valentine has overturned Castle Mount with a single push! Who can believe it? Who can believe it? Lord Hissune! Can it be? How do the princes of the Mount accept it?”

“I think they had little choice,” Hornkast replied. “But let us not concern ourselves with the princes of the Mount. We have our own tasks to carry out, on this our final day of power,”

“And thanks be to the Divine that it is,” said Dilifon.

The Ghayrog glared at him. “You speak for yourself alone!”

“Perhaps I do. But I speak also for the Pontifex Tyeveras.”

“Who seems to be speaking for himself this day, eh?” said Hornkast. He peered at the document in his hand. “There are several curious problems that I must call to your attention. For example, my staff has so far been unable to locate any description of the proper procedure for proclaiming the death of a Pontifex and the ascension of a new one, it having been so long since such an event has occurred.”

“Very likely no one now alive has any experience of such things,” said Dilifon. “Except the Pontifex Tyeveras himself.”

“I doubt that he will aid us in this matter,” Hornkast said. “We are searching the archives now for details of the proclamation of the death of Ossier and the ascension of Tyeveras, but if we can find nothing we will have to invent our own ceremony.”

Narrameer, eyes closed, said in a low, faraway voice, “You forget. There is one person who was present on the day of the ascension of Tyeveras.”

Hornkast looked at her in amazement. Ancient she was, that everyone knew; but no one knew how ancient, except that she had been the imperial dream-speaker as far back as anyone recalled. But if she had indeed survived out of the reign of Tyeveras as Coronal, she was older even than he imagined; and he felt a shiver go down his back, he who had thought he was himself far beyond the age when anything could cause surprise.

“You remember it, then?” he asked.

“I see it through the mists. It is announced first in the Court of Columns. Then in the Court of Globes, and then in the Place of Masks; and after that, it is declared in the Hall of Winds and the Court of Pyramids. After which, it is announced one final time at the Mouth of Blades. And when the new Pontifex arrives at the Labyrinth, he must enter at the Mouth of Blades and journey down through the levels on foot. That I remember: Tyeveras striding with immense vigor through huge crowds that called his name, and he walked so fast that no one could keep pace with him, and he would not halt until he had traversed the whole Labyrinth to its lowest level. Will the Pontifex Valentine display such energy, I wonder?”

“That is the second curious matter,” said Hornkast. “The Pontifex Valentine has no immediate plans for taking up residence in the Labyrinth.”

“What?” Dilifon blurted.

“He is now at the Isle, with the former Lady and the new Coronal and the new Lady. The Pontifex informs me that it is his intention to go next to Zimroel, in order to bring the rebellious provinces under his control. He expects this process to be a lengthy one, and he urges me to postpone any celebration of his ascension.”

“For how long?” Shinaam asked.

“Indefinitely,” said Hornkast. “Who knows how long this crisis will last? And while it does he will remain in the upper world.”

“In that case,” said Narrameer, “we may expect the crisis to last as long as Valentine lives.”

Hornkast glanced toward her and smiled. “You understand him well. He detests the Labyrinth, and I think will find every pretext to avoid dwelling in it.”

Dilifon shook his head slowly. “But how can that be? The Pontifex must dwell in the Labyrinth! It is the tradition! Never in ten thousand years has a Pontifex lived in the upper world!”

“Never has Valentine been Pontifex, either,” Hornkast said. “I think there will be many changes forthcoming in his reign, if the world survives this war the Shapeshifters wage against it. But I tell you it matters little to me whether he lives in the Labyrinth or in Suvrael or on Castle Mount. My time is over; as is yours, good Dilifon, and yours, Shinaam, and perhaps even yours, my lady Narrameer. Such transformations as may come hold little interest for me.”

“He must dwell here!” said Dilifon again. “How can the new Coronal assert his power, if the Pontifex is also apparent to the citizens of the upper world?”

“Perhaps that is Valentine’s plan,” Shinaam suggested. “He makes himself Pontifex, because he can no longer avoid it, but by remaining above he continues to play the active role of a Coronal, reducing this Lord Hissune of his to a subordinate position. By the Lady, I never thought him so crafty!”

“Nor I,” said Dilifon.

Hornkast said, shrugging, “We have no idea what his intent may be, except that so long as the war continues, he will not come to this place. And his court will follow him about: for we are all relieved of our posts, in the moment when the succession occurs.” He looked slowly about the room. “And I remind you that we have been speaking of Valentine as Pontifex, when in fact the succession has not yet occurred. That is our final responsibility.”

“Ours?” said Shinaam.

“Would you shirk it?” Hornkast asked. “Then go: go, take to your bed, old man, and we will do our work without you. For we must move on to the throne-room now, and discharge our duty. Dilifon? Narrameer?”

“I will accompany you,” Shinaam said dourly.

Hornkast led the way: a slow procession, a parade of antiquities. Several times it was necessary to wait while Dilifon, leaning on the arms of two burly aides, paused for breath. But at last they stood outside the great door of the imperial chamber; and once more Hornkast slipped his hand into the recognition glove and touched the door-opening device, a task that he knew he would never perform again.

Sepulthrove stood beside the intricate life-support globe that housed the Pontifex.

“It is very strange,” the physician said. “After this long silence, he speaks again. Listen: he stirs now.”

And from within the sphere of blue glass came the whistling and gurgling sounds of the voice of Tyeveras; and then, plainly, as he had once before done, he could be heard to say, “Come. Rise. Walk.”

“The same words,” said Sepulthrove.

“Life! Pain! Death!”

“I think he knows,” Hornkast said. “I think he must.”

Sepulthrove frowned. “Knows what?”

Hornkast indicated the decree. “This is Lord Valentine’s proclamation of grief upon the loss of Majipoor’s great emperor.”

“I see,” said the physician, and his hawk-featured face turned dark with congested blood. “So it finally must come.”

“Indeed.”

“Now?” Sepulthrove asked. His hands trembled. He held them poised above a bank of controls.

From the Pontifex came one last burst of words:

“Life, Majesty. Death. Valentine Pontifex of Majipoor!”

There was a terrible silence.

“Now,” Hornkast said.

8

Endlessly back and forth across the sea, now sailing once more from the Isle to Zimroel: it was beginning to seem to Valentine that in one of his former lives he must have been that legendary ancient captain Sinnabor Lavon, who had set out to make the first crossing of the Great Sea and given up the voyage after five years, and who perhaps for that had been condemned to be reborn and sail from land to land without ever halting for rest. But Valentine felt no weariness now, and no yearning to give up this life of wandering that he had undertaken. In a way—a strange and unexpected way— he was still making his grand processional.

The fleet, sped westward by favorable winds, was nearing Piliplok. There had been no dragons in the sea this time to menace or delay the journey, and the crossing had been swift.

From the masts the banners stood out straight toward Zimroel ahead: no longer the green-and-gold colors of the Coronal, for now Lord Hissune sailed under those as he made his separate voyage to Zimroel. Valentine’s ships bore the red-and-black of the Pontifex, with the Labyrinth symbol blazoned upon them.

He had not yet grown accustomed to those colors, nor to that symbol, nor to those other alterations that had come. They did not make the starburst sign to him any longer when they approached him. Well, so be it; he had always thought that such salutes were foolishness, anyway. They did not address him as “my lord” now when they spoke with him, for a Pontifex must be called “your majesty.” Which made little difference to Valentine except that his ear had long since grown accustomed to that oft-repeated “my lord” as a kind of punctuation, a way of marking the rhythm of a sentence, and it was odd not to hear it. It was with difficulty that he got people to speak to him at all, now: for everyone knew that the custom since ancient times had been to address one’s words to the high spokesman of the Pontifex, never to the Pontifex himself, though the Pontifex was right there and perfectly capable of hearing. And when the Pontifex replied, why, he must do it by indirect discourse also, through his spokesman. That was the first of the Pontifical customs that Valentine had discarded; but it was not easy to get others to abide by the change. He had named Sleet his high spokesman—it seemed a natural enough appointment—but Sleet was forbidden to indulge in any of that antique mummery of pretending to be the Pontifex’s ears.

For that matter no one could comprehend the presence of a Pontifex aboard a ship, exposed to the brisk winds and the bright warm sunlight. The Pontifex was an emperor shrouded in mystery. The Pontifex belonged out of sight. The Pontifex, as everyone knew, should be in the Labyrinth.

I will not go, Valentine thought.

I have passed along my crown, and someone else now has the privilege of putting “Lord” before his name, and the Castle now will be Lord Hissune’s Castle, if ever he has the chance to return to it. But I will not bury myself in the ground.

Carabella, emerging on deck, said, “Asenhart asks me to tell you, my lord, that we will be within range of Piliplok in twelve hours, if the wind holds true.”

“Not ‘my lord,’ ” Valentine said.

She grinned. “I find that so hard to remember, your majesty.”

“As do I. But the change has been made.”

“May I not call you ‘my lord’ even so, when we are in private? For that is what you are to me, my lord.”

“Am I? Do I order you about, and have you pour my wine for me, and bring me my slippers like a servant?”

“You know I mean otherwise, Valentine.”

“Then call me Valentine, and not ‘my lord.’ I was your king, and I am your emperor now, but I am not your master. That has always been understood between us, so I thought.”

“I think perhaps it has—your majesty.”

She laughed, and he laughed with her, and drew her close and held her against him. After a moment he said, “I have often told you I feel a certain regret, or even guilt, for having taken you away from a juggler’s free life, and given you in its place all the heavy responsibilities of Castle Mount. And often you have told me, No, no, nonsense, there is nothing to regret, I came of my own will to live by your side.”

“As in all truth I did, my lord.”

“But now I am Pontifex—by the Lady, I say those words, and they sound like another language in my mouth!—I am Pontifex, I am indeed Pontifex, and now I feel once more that I must rob you of the joys of life.”

“Why, Valentine? Must a Pontifex give up his wife, then? I’ve heard nothing of that custom!”

“A Pontifex must live in the Labyrinth, Carabella.”

“You come back to that again!”

“It never leaves me. And if I am to live in the Labyrinth, why, then you must live there also, and how can I ask that of you?”

“Do you ask it of me?”

“You know I have no wish to part from you.”

“Nor I from you, my lord. But we are not in the Labyrinth now, and it was my belief you had no plan for going there.”

“What if I must, Carabella?”

“Who says must to a Pontifex?”

He shook his head. “But what if I must? You know as well as I how little love I have for that place. But if I must—if for reasons of state I must—if the absolute necessity of it is forced upon me, which I pray the Divine will not happen, but if indeed there comes a time when I am compelled by the logic of government to go down into that maze—”

“Why, then I will go with you, my lord.”

“And give up all fair winds, and bright sunny days, and the sea and the forest and the mountains?”

“Surely you would find a pretext for coming forth now and then, even if you found it necessary to take up residence down there.”

“And if I can’t?”

“You pursue problems too far beyond the horizon, my lord. The world is in peril; mighty tasks await you, and no one will shove you into the Labyrinth while those tasks are undone; there is time later to worry about where we will live and how we will like it. Is that not so, my lord?”

Valentine nodded. “Indeed. I foolishly multiply my woes.”

“But I tell you this, and then let us talk no further of it: if you find some honorable way of escaping the Labyrinth forever, I will rejoice, but if you must go down into it I will go with you and never give it a second thought. When as Coronal you took me as consort, do you imagine I failed to see that Lord Valentine must one day become Valentine Pontifex? When I accepted you, I accepted the Labyrinth: just as you, my lord, accepted the Labyrinth when you accepted the crown your brother had worn. So let us say no more on these matters, my lord.”

“’Your majesty,’” said Valentine. He slipped his arm again about her shoulders, and touched his lips lightly to hers. “I will promise to do no more brooding about the Labyrinth,” he said. “And you must promise to call me by my proper title.”

“Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty!”

And she made a wondrous sweeping salutation, swinging her arms round and round in a flamboyantly exaggerated mockery of the Labyrinth symbol.

After a time Carabella went below. Valentine remained on deck, studying the horizon through a seeing-tube.

What kind of reception, he wondered, would he have in the free republic of Piliplok?

There was hardly anyone who had not opposed his decision to go there. Sleet, Tunigorn, Carabella, Hissune—they all spoke of the risk, the uncertainty. Piliplok, in its madness, might do anything—seize him, even, and hold him hostage to guarantee its independence. “Whoever enters Piliplok,” Carabella said, as she had said months before in Piurifayne, “must do so at the head of an army, and you have no army, my lord!”

From Hissune had come the same argument. “It was agreed on Castle Mount,” he said, “that when the new armies are organized, it is the Coronal who should lead troops against Piliplok—while the Pontifex directs the strategy at a safer remove.”

“It will not be necessary to lead troops against Piliplok,” said Valentine.

“Your majesty?”

Valentine said, “I had much experience during the war of restoration in pacifying rebellious subjects without bloodshed. If you were to go to Piliplok—a new Coronal, untried, unknown, with soldiers at his back—it would be sure to stir armed resistance in them. But if the Pontifex himself appears—who can remember a time when a Pontifex was seen in Piliplok?—they will be awed, they will be cowed, they will not dare to raise a hand against him even if he enter the city alone.”

Though Hissune had continued to voice strong doubts, in the end Valentine overruled him. There could have been no other outcome, Valentine knew: this early in his Pontificate, having only just handed over the temporal power of the Coronal to the younger man, he could not yet relegate himself wholly to the kind of figurehead position that a Pontifex might be expected to assume. Power, Valentine was discovering, was not easily relinquished, not even by those who once thought they had little love for it.

But it was not wholly a matter of contending for power, Valentine realized. It was a matter of preventing bloodshed where bloodshed was needless. Hissune plainly did not believe that Piliplok could be retaken peacefully; Valentine intended to demonstrate that it could be. Call it part of the new Coronal’s education in the arts of government, Valentine thought. And if I fail, he thought—well, then, call it part of mine.

In the morning, as Piliplok burst into view high above the dark mouth of the great river Zimr, Valentine ordered his fleet to form two wings, with his flagship, the Lady Thiin, at their apex. And he placed himself, clad in the richly hued Pontifical robes of scarlet and black that he had had made for himself before departing from the Isle, at the prow of his vessel, so that all of Piliplok might see him clearly as the royal fleet approached.

“Again they send the dragon-ships to us,” Sleet said.

Yes. As had been done the last time, when Valentine as Coronal had come to Piliplok on what was to have been the beginning of his grand processional through Zimroel, the fleet of dragon-hunters was sailing forth to meet him. But that other time they had had bright Coronal-ensigns of green and gold fluttering in their riggings, and they had greeted him with the joyous sounds of trumpets and drums. Now, Valentine saw, the dragon-ships flew a different flag, a yellow one with a great crimson slash across it, as somber and sinister as the spike-tailed vessels themselves. It was surely the flag of the free republic that Piliplok now deemed itself to be; nor was this fleet coming to hail him in any friendly way.

Grand Admiral Asenhart looked uneasily toward Valentine. He indicated the speaking-tube he held, and said, “Shall I order them to yield and escort us into port, majesty?” But the Pontifex only smiled, and signaled to him to be calm.

Now the mightiest of the Piliplok vessels, a monstrous thing with a horrifying fanged figurehead and bizarrely elaborate three-pronged masts, moved forward from the line and took up a position close by the Lady Thiin. Valentine recognized it as the ship of old Guidrag, the senior among the dragon-captains: and yes, there she was, the fierce old Skandar woman herself on the deck, calling out through a speaking tube, “In the name of the free republic of Piliplok, stand forth and identify yourselves!”

“Give me the tube,” Valentine said to Asenhart. Putting it to his lips, he cried, “This is the Lady Thiin, and I am Valentine. Come aboard and speak with me, Guidrag.”

“I may not do that, my lord.”

“I did not say Lord Valentine, but Valentine,” he responded. “Do you take my meaning? And if you will not come to me, why, then I will go to you! Prepare to take me on board.”

“Majesty!” said Sleet in horror.

Valentine turned to Asenhart. “Make ready a floater-basket for us. Sleet, you are the high spokesman: you will accompany me. And you, Deliamber.”

Carabella said urgently, “My lord, I beg you—”

“If they mean to seize us,” he said, “they will seize us whether I am aboard their ship or mine. They have twenty ships for each of ours, and well-armed ones at that. Come, Sleet—Deliamber—”

“Majesty,” said Lisamon Hultin sternly, “you may not go unless I accompany you!”

With a smile Valentine said, “Ah, well done! You give commands to the Pontifex! I admire your spirit: but no, I will take no bodyguards this time, no weapons, no protection of any sort except these robes. Is the floater ready, Asenhart?”

The basket was rigged and suspended from the foremast. Valentine clambered in, and beckoned to Sleet, grim-faced and bleak, and to the Vroon. He looked back at the others gathered on the deck of the flagship, Carabella, Tunigorn, Asenhart, Zalzan Kavol, Lisamon, Shanamir, all staring at him as though he had at last taken complete leave of his wits. “You should know me better by this time,” he said softly, and ordered the basket lifted over the side.

Out over the water it drifted, skimming lightly above the waves, and climbing the side of the dragon-ship until snared by the hook that Guidrag lowered for it. A moment later Valentine stepped out onto the deck of the other vessel, the timbers of which were dark with the ineradicable stains of sea-dragon blood. A dozen towering Skandars, the least of whom was half again Valentine’s size, confronted him, and at their head was old Guidrag, even more gap-toothed than before, her thick matted fur even more faded. Her yellow eyes gleamed with force and authority, but Valentine detected some uncertainty in her features as well.

He said, “What is this, Guidrag, that you offer me so unkind a welcome on this visit?”

“My lord, I had no idea it was you returning to us.”

“Yet it seems I have returned once again. And am I not to be greeted with more joy than this?”

“My lord—things have changed here,” she said, faltering a little.

“Changed? The free republic?” He glanced about the deck, and at the other dragon-ships arrayed on all sides. “What is a free republic, Guidrag? I think I have not heard the term before. I ask you: what does it mean?”

“I am only a dragon-captain, my lord. These political things—they are not for me to speak of—”

“Forgive me, then. But tell me this, at least: why were you sent forth to meet my fleet, if not to welcome us and guide us to port?”

Guidrag said, “I was sent not to welcome you but to turn you away. Though I tell you again that we had no idea it was you, my lord—that we knew only it was a fleet of imperial ships—”

“And imperial ships are no longer welcome in Piliplok?”

There was a long pause.

“No, my lord,” said the Skandar woman lamely. “They are not, my lord. We have—how do I say this?—we have withdrawn from the empire, my lord. That is what a free republic is. It is a territory that rules itself, and is not governed from without.”

Valentine lifted his eyebrows delicately. “Ah, and why is that? Is the rule of the imperial government so burdensome, do you think?”

“You play with me, my lord. These matters are beyond my understanding. I know only that these are difficult times, that changes have been made, that Piliplok now chooses to decide its own destinies.”

“Because Piliplok still has food, and other cities have none, and the burden of feeding the hungry is too heavy for Piliplok? Is that it, Guidrag?”

“My lord—”

“And you must stop calling me ‘my lord,’ ” said Valentine. “You must call me ‘your majesty’ now.”

The dragon-captain, looking more troubled than ever, replied, “But are you no longer Coronal, my lord—your majesty—?”

“The changes in Piliplok are not the only changes that have occurred,” he said. “I will show you, Guidrag. And then I will return to my ship, and you will lead me to the harbor, and I will speak with the masters of this free republic of yours, so that they can explain it to me more thoroughly. Eh, Guidrag? Let me show you who I am.”

And he took Sleet’s hand in one of his, and a tentacle of Deliamber’s in the other, and moved easily and smoothly into the waking sleep, the trance-state that allowed him to speak mind to mind as though he were issuing sendings. And from his soul to Guidrag’s there flowed a current of vitality and power so great that it caused the air between them to glow; for he drew now not only on the strength that had been growing in himself throughout this time of trial and turmoil, but on that which was lent him by Sleet and the Vroon, and by his comrades aboard the Lady Thiin, and by Lord Hissune and Hissune’s mother the Lady, and by his own mother the former Lady, and by all others who loved Majipoor as it had been and as they wished it would be again. And he reached forth to Guidrag and then beyond her to the Skandar dragon-hunters at her side, and then to the crews of the other ships, and then to the citizens of the free republic of Piliplok across the waters; and the message that he sent them was a simple one, that he had come to them to forgive them for their errors and to receive from them their renewed loyalty to the great commonwealth that was Majipoor. And he told them also that Majipoor was indivisible and that the strong must aid the weak or all would perish together, for the world stood at the brink of doom and nothing but a single mighty effort would save it. And lastly he told them that the beginning of the end of the time of chaos was at hand, for Pontifex and Coronal and Lady and King of Dreams were striding forth together to set things to rights, and all would be made whole again, if only they had faith in the justice of the Divine, in whose name he reigned now as supreme monarch.

He opened his eyes. He saw Guidrag dazed and swaying and sinking slowly to her knees on the deck, and the other Skandars beside her doing the same. Then she threw up her hands before her eyes as though to shield them from a terrible light, and murmured in a stunned, awestruck way, “My lord—your majesty—your majesty—”

“Valentine!” someone cried, farther back on the deck. “Valentine Pontifex!” And the cry was taken up by one sailor after another: “Valentine Pontifex! Valentine Pontifex!” until it went echoing from ship to ship, all across the waters and even to the ramparts of distant Piliplok:

“Valentine! Valentine Pontifex! Valentine Pontifex!”