Valentine Pontifex m-3

by Robert Silverberg

  —Mother —

  —Lady—

  —Mother—

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

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

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

  “Who are you?” he whispered.

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

  “Most certainly I am.”

  “No.”

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

  “Pontifex? Coronal, you mean.”

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

  “And my mother? Where is she?”

  “I am she, Valentine.”

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

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

  “How is my lord?” she asked at once.

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

  “Oh, love, how sorry I am!”

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

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

  “What message is that?”

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

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

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

  “An unusual name,” Valentine said.

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

  Valentine felt a tightening in his chest.

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

  “Plagues? What plagues?”

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

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

  He whirled to face her. She was pointing skyward.

  “What are those?”

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

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

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

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

  “What were those things?” he asked.

  “Wind-spiders, my lord.”

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

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

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

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

  “And this happens every year?” Valentine asked.

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

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

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

  “And before that?”

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

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

  “My lord—forgive me—�
��

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

  “Sleet!” he called.

  “Lordship?”

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

  “For Zimroel, my lord?”

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

  “Valentine?” a small voice said.

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

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

  TWO

  The Book of the Water-Kings

  1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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