Control yourself, Valentine thought. You are Coronal of Majipoor.
With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination.
“The toast to the Pontifex, lordship—”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
Phantom images still haunted him. Ghostly fleshless fingers plucked at him. He fought free. Control. Control. Control.
He felt utterly lost.
“The toast, lordship!”
The toast? The toast? What was that? A ceremony. An obligation upon him.You are Coronal of Majipoor. Yes. He must speak. He must say words to these people.
“Friends—” he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos.
8
“The Coronal wants to see you,” Shanamir said.
Hissune looked up, startled. For the past hour and a half he had been waiting tensely in a dismal many-columned antechamber with a grotesque bulbous ceiling, wondering what was happening behind the closed doors of Lord Valentine’s suite and whether he was supposed to remain here indefinitely. It was well past midnight, and some ten hours from now the Coronal and his staff were to depart from the Labyrinth on the next leg of the grand processional, unless tonight’s strange events had altered that plan. Hissune still had to make his way all the way up to the outermost ring, gather his possessions and say goodbye to his mother and sisters, and get back here in time to join the outbound party—and fit some sleep into the picture, too. All was in confusion.
After the collapse of the Coronal, after Lord Valentine had been carried away to his suite, after the banquet hall had been cleared, Hissune and some of the other members of the Coronal’s group had assembled in this drab room nearby. Word had come, after a time, that Lord Valentine was recovering well, and that they were all to wait there for further instructions. Then, one by one, they had been summoned to the Coronal—Tunigorn first, then Ermanar, Asenhart, Shanamir, and the rest, until Hissune was left alone with some members of the Coronal’s guard and a few very minor staff people. He did not feel like asking any of these subalterns what the appropriate thing for him to do might be; but he dared not leave, either, and so he waited, and waited some more, and went on waiting.
He closed his eyes when they grew raw and began to ache, though he did not sleep. A single image revolved endlessly in his mind: the Coronal beginning to fall, and he and Lisamon Hultin springing from their seats at the same moment to catch him. He was unable to shake from his mind the horror of that sudden astonishing climax to the banquet: the Coronal bemused, pathetic, groping for words and failing to find the right ones, swaying, teetering, falling—
Of course a Coronal was just as capable of getting himself drunk and behaving foolishly as anyone else. One of the many things that Hissune’s illicit explorations of the memory-readings in the Register of Souls during the years he worked in the House of Records had taught him was that there was nothing superhuman about the men who wore the starburst crown. So it was altogether possible that this evening Lord Valentine, who seemed so intensely to dislike being in the Labyrinth, had allowed the free-flowing wine to ease that dislike, until, when it was his turn to speak, he was in a drunken muddle.
But somehow Hissune doubted that it was wine that had muddled the Coronal, even though Lord Valentine had said as much himself. He had been watching the Coronal closely all during the speechmaking, and he hadn’t seemed at all drunk then, only convivial, joyous, relaxed. And afterward, when the little Vroonish wizard had brought Lord Valentine back from his swoon by touching his tentacles to him, the Coronal had seemed a trifle shaky, as anyone who had fainted might be, but nevertheless quite clearheaded. Nobody could sober up that fast. No, Hissune thought, more likely it had been something other than drunkenness, some sorcery, some deep sending that had seized Lord Valentine’s spirit just at that moment. And that was terrifying.
He rose now and went down the winding corridor to the Coronal’s chambers. As he approached the intricately carved door, gleaming with brilliant golden starbursts and royal monograms, it opened and Tunigorn and Ermanar emerged, looking drawn and somber. They nodded to him and Tunigorn, with a quick gesture of his finger, ordered the guards at the door to let him go in.
Lord Valentine sat at a broad desk of some rare and highly polished blood-colored wood. The Coronal’s big heavy-knuckled hands were spread out before him against the surface of the desk, as though he were supporting himself with them. His face was pale, his eyes seemed to be having difficulty focusing, his shoulders were slumped.
“My lord—” Hissune began uncertainly, and faltered into silence.
He remained just within the doorway, feeling awkward, out of place, keenly uncomfortable. Lord Valentine did not seem to have noticed him. The old dream-speaker Tisana was in the room, and Sleet, and the Vroon, but no one said a thing. Hissune was baffled. He had no idea what the etiquette of approaching a tired and obviously ill Coronal might be. Was one supposed to offer one’s kind sympathies, or to pretend that the monarch was in the finest of health? Hissune made the starburst gesture, and, getting no response, made it again. He felt his cheeks blazing.
He searched for some shred of his former youthful self-assurance, and found nothing. Strangely, he seemed to be growing more ill at ease with Lord Valentine, rather than less, the more often he saw the Coronal. That was hard to understand.
Sleet rescued him at last, saying loudly, “My lord, it is the Initiate Hissune.”
The Coronal raised his head and stared at Hissune. The depth of fatigue that his fixed and glassy eyes revealed was terrifying. And yet, as Hissune watched in amazement, Lord Valentine drew himself back from the brink of exhaustion the way a man who has caught a vine after slipping over the edge of a precipice pulls himself to safety: with a desperate show of unanswerable strength. It was astonishing to see some color come to his cheeks, some animation to his expression. He managed even to project a distinct kingliness, a feeling of command. Hissune, awed, wondered if it might be some trick they learn on Castle Mount, when they are in training to become Coronals—
“Come closer,” Lord Valentine said.
Hissune took a couple of steps deeper into the room.
“Are you afraid of me?”
“My lord—”
“I can’t allow you to waste time fearing me, Hissune. I have too much work to do. And so do you. Once I believed that you felt absolutely no awe of me at all. Was I wrong?”
“My lord, it’s only that you look so tired—and I’m tired myself, I suppose—this night has been so strange, for me, for you, for everyone—”
The Coronal nodded. “A night full of great strangenesses, yes. Is it morning yet? I never know the time, when I’m in this place.”
“A little past midnight, my lord.”
“Only a little past midnight? I thought it was almost morning. How long this night has been!” Lord Valentine laughed softly. “But it’s always a little past midnight in the Labyrinth, isn’t it, Hissune? By the Divine, if you could know how I yearn to see the sun again!”
“My lord—” Deliamber murmured tactfully. “It does indeed grow late, and there is still much to do—”
“Indeed.” For an instant the Coronal’s eyes flickered into glassiness again. Then, recovering once more, he said, “To business, then. The first item of which is the giving of my thanks. I’d have been badly hurt but for your being there to catch me. You must have been on your way toward me before I went over, eh? Was it that obvious I was about to keel over?”
Reddening a little, Hissune said, “It was, lordship. At least to me.”
“Ah.”
“But I may have been watching you more closely than the others were.”
“Yes. I dare say you may have been.”
“I hope your lordship won’t greatly suffer the ill effects of—of—”
A faint smile appeared on the Coronal’s lips. “I wasn’t drunk, Hissune.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—I mean—but that is to say—”
“War?” Hissune blurted. The word was unfamiliar, alien, ugly: it hovered in the air like some foul droning insect looking for prey. War? War? Into Hissune’s mind leaped an image eight thousand years old, springing from the cache of memories he had stolen in the Register of Souls: the dry hills of the far northwest ablaze, the sky black with thick coils of rising smoke, in the final awful convulsion of Lord Stiamot’s long war against the Metamorphs. But that was ancient history. There had been no war in all the centuries since, other than the war of restoration. And scarce any lives had been lost in that, by design of Lord Valentine, to whom violence was an abomination. “How can there be war?” Hissune demanded. “We have no wars on Majipoor!”
“War’s coming, boy!” said Sleet roughly. “And when it does, by the Lady, there’ll be no hiding from it!”
“But war with whom? This is the most peaceful of worlds. What enemy could there be?”
“There is one,” Sleet said. “Are you Labyrinth people so sheltered from the real world that you fail to comprehend that?”
Hissune frowned. “The Metamorphs, you mean?”
“Aye, the Metamorphs!” Sleet cried. “The filthy Shapeshifters, boy! Did you think we could keep them penned up forever? By the Lady, there’ll be a rampage soon enough!”
Hissune stared in shock and amazement at the lean little scar-faced man. Sleet’s eyes were shining. He seemed almost to welcome the prospect.
Shaking his head slowly, Hissune said, “With all respect, High Counsellor Sleet, this makes no sense to me. A few millions of them, against twenty billions of us? They fought that war once, and lost it, and however much they hate us, I don’t think they’re going to try it again.”
Sleet pointed toward the Coronal, who seemed barely to be listening. “And the time they put their own puppet on Lord Valentine’s throne? What was that if not a declaration of war? Ah, boy, boy, you know nothing! The Shapeshifters have been scheming against us for centuries, and their time is at hand. The Coronal’s own dreams foretell it! By the Lady, the Coronal himself dreams of war!”
“By the Lady indeed, Sleet,” said the Coronal in a voice of infinite weariness, “there’ll be no war if I can help it, and you know that.”
“And if you can’t help it, my lord?” Sleet shot back.
The little man’s chalk-white face was flushed now with excitement; his eyes gleamed, he made tight rapid obsessive gestures with his hands, as though he were juggling invisible clubs. It had not occurred to Hissune that anyone, even a High Counsellor, spoke so bluntly to Coronals. And perhaps it did not happen often, for Hissune saw something much like anger cross the face of Lord Valentine: Lord Valentine who was reputed never to have known rage, who had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration. Then that anger gave way to the dreadful weariness again, which made the Coronal seem to be a man of seventy or eighty years, and not the young and vigorous forty or so that Hissune knew him to be.
There was an endless moment of tense silence. At length Lord Valentine said, speaking slowly and deliberately and addressing his words to Hissune as though no one else were in the room. “Let me hear no more talk of war while hope of peace remains. But the omens were dark, true enough: if there is not to be war, there is certain to be some calamity of another kind. I will not ignore such warnings. We have changed some of our plans this night, Hissune.”
“Will you call off the grand processional, my lord?”
“That I must not do. Again and again I’ve postponed it, saying that there was too much work for me at Castle Mount, that I had no time to go jaunting about the world. Perhaps I’ve postponed it too long. The processional should be made every seven or eight years.”
“And has it been longer than that, sir?”
“Almost ten. Nor did I complete the tour, that other time, for at Til-omon, you know, there was that small interruption, when someone else relieved me for a while of my tasks, without my knowledge.” The Coronal stared past Hissune into an infinitely remote distance. He seemed for a moment to be peering into the misty gulfs of time: thinking, perhaps, of the bizarre usurpation that had been worked upon him by the Barjazid, and of the months or years that he had roamed Majipoor bereft of his mind and of his might. Lord Valentine shook his head. “No, the grand processional must be made. Must be extended, in fact. I had thought to travel only through Alhanroel, but I think we will need to visit both continents. The people of Zimroel also must see that there is a Coronal. And if Sleet is right that the Metamorphs are the ones we must fear, why, then Zimroel is the place we must go, for that is where the Metamorphs dwell.”
Hissune had not expected that. A great surge of excitement arose in him. Zimroel too! That unimaginably distant place of forests and vast rivers and great cities, more than half legendary to him—magical cities with magical names—
“Ah, if that is the new plan, how splendid it sounds, my lord!” he said, smiling broadly. “I had thought never to see that land, except in dreams! Will we go to Ni-moya? And Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal—”
“Quite likely I will,” said the Coronal in an oddly flat voice that fell upon Hissune’s ears like a cudgel.
“I, my lord?” said Hissune with sudden alarm.
Softly Lord Valentine said, “Another of the changes of plan. You will not be accompanying me on the grand processional.”
A terrible chill swept through Hissune then, as if the wind that blows between the stars had descended and was scouring out the deepest chambers of the Labyrinth. He trembled, and his soul shriveled under that cold blast, and he felt himself withering away to a husk.
“Am I then dismissed from your service, lordship?”
“Dismissed? Not at all! Surely you understand that I have important plans for you!”
“So you have said, several times, my lord. But the processional—”
“Is not the right preparation for the tasks you someday will be called upon to perform. No, Hissune, I can’t afford to let you spend the next year or two bounding around from province to province at my side. You’re to leave for Castle Mount as soon as possible.”
“Castle Mount, my lord?”
“To begin the training appropriate to a knight-initiate.”
“My lord?” said Hissune in amazement.
“You are—what, eighteen? So you’re years behind the others. But you’re quick: you’ll make up for the lost time, you’ll rise to your true level soon enough. You must, Hissune. We have no idea what evil is about to come upon our world, but I know now that I must expect the worst, and prepare for it by preparing others to stand beside me when the worst arrives. So there will be no grand processional for you, Hissune.”
“I understand, my lord.”
“Do you? Yes, I think you do. There’ll be time later for you to see Piliplok and Ni-moya and Pidruid, won’t there? But now—now—”
Hissune nodded, though in truth he hardly dared to think that he comprehended what Lord Valentine appeared to be telling him. For a long moment the Coronal stared at him; and Hissune met the gaze of those weary blue eyes steadily and evenly, though he was beginning to feel an exhaustion beyond anything he had ever known. The audience, he realized, had come to its end, though no word of dismissal had been uttered. In silence he made the starburst gesture and backed from the room.
He wanted nothing more than sleep now, a week of it, a month. This bewildering night had drained him of all his strength. Only two days ago this same Lord Valentine had summoned him to this very room, and told him to make ready at once to leave the Labyrinth, for he was to set forth as part of the royal entourage that was making the grand processional through Alhanroel; and yesterday he had been named one of the Coronal�
��s aides, and given a seat at the high table of tonight’s banquet; and now the banquet had come and gone in mysterious chaos, and he had beheld the Coronal haggard and all too human in his confusion, and the gift of the grand processional had been snatched back, and now—Castle Mount? A knight-initiate? Making up for lost time? Making up what? Life has become a dream, Hissune thought. And there is no one who can speak it for me.
In the hallway outside the Coronal’s suite, Sleet caught him suddenly by the wrist and pulled him close. Hissune sensed the strange power of the man, the taut energies coiled within him.
“Just to tell you, boy—I meant no personal enmity, when I spoke so harshly to you in there.”
“I never took it that way.”
“Good. Good. I want no enmity with you.”
“Nor I with you, Sleet.”
“I think we’ll have much work to do together, you and I, when the war comes.”
“If the war comes.”
Sleet smiled bleakly. “There’s no doubt of it. But I won’t fight that battle with you all over again just now. You’ll come over to my way of thinking soon enough. Valentine can’t see trouble until trouble’s biting at his boots—it’s his nature, he’s too sweet, has too much faith in the good will of others, I think—but you’re different, eh, boy? You walk with your eyes open. I think that’s what the Coronal prizes the most in you. Do you follow what I say?”
“It’s been a long night, Sleet.”
“So it has. Get some sleep, boy. If you can.”
9
The first rays of morning sun touched the ragged gray muddy shore of southeastern Zimroel and lit that somber coast with a pale green glow. The coming of dawn brought instant wake-fulness to the five Liimen camped in a torn, many-times-patched tent on the flank of a dune a few hundred yards from the sea. Without a word they rose, scooped handfuls of damp sand, rubbed it over the rough, pockmarked gray-black skin of their chests and arms to make the morning ablution. When they left the tent, they turned toward the west, where a few faint stars still glowed in the dark sky, and offered their salute.
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