Valentine Pontifex m-3

by Robert Silverberg

  Almost at once she felt the effect. She swayed, blinked, had to struggle to keep her head from falling forward against her knees. It’s because I drank it on an empty stomach, she told herself. She crouched down, leaned forward, began to chant along with the congregation, a low wordless meaningless repetitious murmur, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah, just as absurd as what those others had been shouting in the street, but somehow gentler, a tender crooning yearning cry, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah. And as she chanted it seemed to her that she heard a distant music, weird, otherworldly, the sound of many bells far away, ringing in patterns of overlapping changes that were impossible to follow for long, since one strand of melody quickly became lost inside its successor, and that one in the next. Oo wah vah mah, she sang, and back to her came the song of the bells, and then she had a sense of something immense very close by, perhaps even in this very room, something colossal and winged and ancient and enormously intelligent, something whose intellect was as far beyond her comprehension as hers would be beyond a bird’s. It was turning and turning and turning in vast unhurried orbits, and each time it turned it unfolded its giant wings and spread them to the ends of the world, and when it folded them again they brushed against the gates of Millilain’s mind—just a tickle, just the lightest of touches, a feather-whisk, and yet she felt herself transformed by it, lifted out of herself, made part of some organism of many minds, unimaginable, godlike. Take. Drink. Join. With each touch of those wings she joined more profoundly. Oh wah vah mah. Oo wah vah mah. She was lost. There was no more Millilain. There was only the water-king whose sound was the sound of bells, and the many-minded mind of which the former Millilain had become a part. Oo. Wah. Vah. Mah.

  It frightened her. She was being drugged down to the bottom of the sea, and her lungs were filling with water, and the pain was terrible. She fought. She would not let the great wings touch her. She pulled back, and pounded with her fists, and forced her way upward, up toward the surface—

  Opened her eyes. Sat up, dazed, terrified. All about her the chanting was going on. Oo, wah, vah, mah. Millilain shuddered. Where am I? What have I done? I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. In panic she struggled to her feet and went blundering down the row to the aisle. No one stopped her. The wine still muzzed her mind and she found herself lurching, staggering, clutching at the walls. She was out of the room, now. Stumbling down that long dark fragrant corridor. The wings were still beating about her, enfolding her, reaching toward her mind. What have I done, what have I done?

  Out into the alleyway, the darkness, the rain. Were they still marching around out here, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Order of the Triple Sword and whoever those others were? She did not care. Let whatever come that may. She began to run, not knowing which way she ran. There was a dull heavy booming sound far away that she hoped was the Confalume Geyser. Other sounds pounded in her mind. Yah-tah yah-tah yah -tah voom. Oo, wah, vah, mah. She felt the wings closing about her. She ran, and tripped and fell, and rose and went on running.

  7

  The deeper they journeyed into the Shapeshifter province, the more familiar everything began to look to Valentine. And yet at the same time the conviction had come to grow in him that he was making some ghastly and terrible mistake.

  He remembered the scent of the place: rich, musky, complex, the sweet heavy aroma of growth and decay going forward with equal intensities under the constant warm rainfall, an intricate mix of flavors that flooded the nostrils to dizzying effect at every intake of breath. He remembered the close, clinging, moist air, and the showers that fell almost hourly, pattering against the forest roof high overhead and trickling down from leaf to shiny leaf until just a little reached the ground. He remembered the fantastic profusion of plant life, everything sprouting and uncoiling almost while one watched, and yet somehow oddly disciplined, everything fitting into well-defined layers—the towering slender trees bare of branches for seven eighths of their height, then flaring out into great umbrellas of leaves tied together into a tight canopy by a tangle of vines and creepers and epiphytes, and under that a level of shorter, rounder, fuller, more shade-tolerant trees, and a stratum of clumping shrubbery below that, and then the forest floor, dark, mysterious, all but barren, a stark expanse of damp thin spongy soil that bounced jauntily underfoot. He remembered the sudden shafts of light, deep-hued and alien, that came spearing at unpredictable intervals through the canopy to provide quick startling moments of clarity in the dimness.

  But the Piurifayne rain-forest spread over thousands of square miles of the heart of Zimroel, and one part of it very likely looked much like any other part. Somewhere in here was the Shapeshifter capital, Ilirivoyne: but what reason do I have, Valentine asked himself, to think that I am near it, merely because the smells and sounds and textures of this jungle are similar to the smells and sounds and textures I recall from years ago?

  That other time—traveling with the wandering jugglers, when they had taken the mad notion that they might earn a few royals by going to perform at the Metamorphs’ harvest festival—there had at least been Deliamber to cast a few Vroonish spells to sniff out the right fork in the road, and the valiant Lisamon Hultin, also wise in the ways of jungle lore. But on this second venture into Piurifayne Valentine was entirely on his own.

  Deliamber and Lisamon, if they were still alive at all—and he was gloomy on that score, for in all these weeks he had had no contact with them even in dreams—were somewhere hundreds of miles behind him, on the far side of the Steiche. Nor had he had any sort of report from Tunigorn, whom he had sent back to look for them. He rode now only with Carabella and Sleet and a bodyguard of Skandars. Carabella had courage and endurance but little skill as a pathfinder, and the Skandars were strong and brave but not very bright, and Sleet, for all his shrewd, sober-minded ways, was in this region hampered greatly by the paralyzing dread of Shapeshifters that had been laid upon him in a dream while he was young, and which he had never fully been able to throw off. It was folly for a Coronal to be roaming the jungles of Piurifayne with so skimpy an entourage: but folly seemed to have become the hallmark of recent Coronals, Valentine thought, considering that his two predecessors, Malibor and Voriax, had met early and violent deaths while off doing foolish things. Perhaps it has become the custom, this rashness of kings.

  And it seemed to him that from day to day he was neither getting closer to Ilirivoyne nor farther from it; that it was everywhere and nowhere, in these jungles; that perhaps the whole city had picked itself up and was moving onward just ahead of him, maintaining a constant distance from him, a gap he could never close. For the Shapeshifter capital, as he recalled it from that other time, was a place of flimsy wicker-work buildings, and only a few more substantial ones, and it had seemed to him then a makeshift phantom city that might well flit from one site to another at the whim of its inhabitants: a nomad-city, a dream city, a jungle will-o’-the-wisp.

  “Look, there,” Carabella said. “Is that a trail, Valentine?”

  “Perhaps it is,” he said.

  “And perhaps not?”

  “Perhaps not, yes.”

  They had seen hundreds of trails much like it: faint scars on the jungle floor, the unreadable imprints of some former presence, imprints made last month, possibly, or possibly in the time of Lord Dekkeret a thousand years before. An occasional stick planted in the ground, with a bit of feather fastened to it, maybe, or a scrap of ribbon; a row of grooves, as of something having been dragged this way once; or sometimes nothing in any way visible, just a psychic spoor, the mystifying vestigial trace of the passage of intelligent beings. But none of these things ever led them anywhere. Sooner or later the clues dwindled and became imperceptible and only virgin jungle lay ahead.

  “Shall we make camp, my lord?” Sleet said.

  Neither he nor Carabella had spoken a word yet against this expedition, foolhardy though it must seem to them. Did they understand, Valentine wondered, how urgently he felt the need to consummate his meeti
ng with the Shapeshifter queen? Or was it out of fear of the wrath of king and husband that they kept this obliging silence through these weeks of aimless roaming, when surely they must think his time was better spent in the civilized provinces, coping with whatever awful crisis must be unfolding there? Or were they—worst of all—merely humoring him as he spun his mad way through these dense rain-swept glades? He dared not ask. He wondered only how long he would pursue the quest, despite his gathering conviction that he was never to find Ilirivoyne.

  When they were settled for the night he donned the Lady’s silver circlet and thrust himself once again into the trance state, the mind-casting state, and sent his spirit outward across the jungle, seeking Deliamber, seeking Tisana.

  He thought it likely that he could reach their minds more easily than any of the others, sensitive as those two were to the witcheries of dreams. But he had tried, night after night, without ever once feeling a flicker of contact. Was distance the problem? Valentine had never attempted long-range mindcasting except with the aid of dream-wine, and he had none of that there. Or perhaps the Metamorphs had some way of intercepting or disrupting his transmissions. Or perhaps his messages were not getting through because those he was sending them to were dead. Or—

  —Tisana—Tisana —

  —Deliamber—

  —This is Valentine calling you —Valentine —Valentine—Valentine—

  —Tisana —

  —Deliamber —

  Nothing.

  He tried reaching Tunigorn. Surely Tunigorn still lived, no matter what calamity had overtaken the others; and though his mind was stolid and well defended, nevertheless there was always the hope it might open to one of Valentine’s probes. Or Lisamon’s. Or Zalzan Kavol’s. To touch any of them, to feel the familiar response of a familiar mind—

  He went on for a time; and then, sadly, he removed the circlet and restored it to its case. Carabella gave him an inquiring glance. Valentine shook his head and shrugged. “It’s very quiet out there,” he said.

  “Except for the rain.”

  “Yes. Except for the rain.”

  The rain was drumming delicately against the lofty forest canopy once more. Valentine peered gloomily into the jungle, but he saw nothing: the floater’s beam was on, and would stay on all night, but beyond the golden sphere of light that that created lay only a wall of blackness. A thousand Metamorphs might be gathered in a ring around the camp, for all he knew. He wished it were so. Anything—even a surprise attack—would be preferable to these foolish weeks of wandering in an unknown and unknowable wilderness.

  How long, he asked himself, am I going to keep this up?

  And how are we ever going to find our way out of here, once I decide that this quest is absurd?

  He listened somberly to the changing rhythms of the rain until he drifted finally into sleep.

  Almost at once, he felt the onset of a dream.

  By its intensity and by a certain vividness and warmth he knew it to be no ordinary dream but rather a sending of the Lady, the first he had had since leaving the coast of Gihorna; and yet as he waited for some tangible sign of the presence of his mother in his mind he grew perplexed, for she had not announced herself, and indeed the impulses penetrating his soul seemed to come from another source entirely. The King of Dreams? He too had the power to enter minds from afar, of course; but not even in such strange times as these would the King of Dreams presume to aim his instrument at the Coronal. Who, then? Valentine, watchful even in sleep, scanned the boundaries of his dream, seeking and not finding an answer.

  The dream was almost entirely without narrative structure: it was a thing of shapeless forms and silent sounds, creating a sense of event by purely abstract means. But gradually the dream presented him with a cluster of moving images and slippery shifts of mood that became a metaphor for something quite concrete: the writhing, interlacing tentacles of a Vroon.

  —Deliamber?

  —I am here, my lord.

  —Where?

  —Here. Close by you. Moving toward you.

  That much was communicated not in any kind of speech, mental or otherwise, but entirely through a grammar of shifting patterns of light and mind-state that carried unambiguous meaning. After a while the dream left him, and he lay still, neither awake nor asleep, reflecting on what had come to him; and for the first time in weeks he felt some sense of hope.

  In the morning as Sleet was preparing to strike camp Valentine said, “No. I plan to remain here another few days. Or possibly even longer.”

  A look of doubt and confusion, instantly suppressed but briefly evident, passed across Sleet’s face. But he merely nodded and went off to tell the Skandars to leave the tents as they were.

  Carabella said, “This night has brought you news, my lord. I see that in your face.”

  “Deliamber lives. He and the others have been following us, trying to rejoin us. But we’ve been drifting about so much, traveling so quickly—they can’t catch up with us. As soon as they have a fix on us, we head off in some new direction. If we remain in one place they’ll be able to find us.”

  “You spoke with the Vroon, then?”

  “With his image, with his shadow. But it was the true shadow, the authentic image. He’ll be with us soon.”

  And indeed Valentine had no doubt of that. But a day passed, and another, and another. Each night he donned his circlet and sent forth a signal, and had no response. The Skandar guards took to prowling the jungle like restless beasts; Sleet grew tense and fidgety, and went off alone for hours at a time, despite the fear of Metamorphs he claimed to feel. Carabella, seeing matters growing so edgy, suggested that he and she and Valentine do a little juggling, for the sake of old times and to give themselves an amusement so demanding it would draw their minds away from other concerns; but Sleet said he had no heart for it and Valentine, when he agreed at her urging to try it, was so fumble-fingered from lack of practice that he would have abandoned the attempt in the first five minutes, but for Carabella’s insistence. “Of course you’re rusty!” she said. “Do you think the skill stays sharp without some honing? But it comes back, if you work at it. Here, Valentine: catch! Catch! Catch!”

  Indeed she was right. A little effort, and he began to feel once more the old sense that the union of hand and eye could carry him to a place where time had no meaning and all of space became a single infinite point. The Skandars, though they must surely have known that juggling had once been Valentine’s profession, were plainly astounded at seeing a Coronal do any such thing, and gaped in undisguised curiosity and awe as Valentine and Carabella tossed a motley galaxy of objects back and forth to one another.

  “Hoy!” she cried, and “Hoy!” and “Hoy!” as she led him on to ever more complex feats. They were nothing compared with the tricks she had routinely performed in the old days, for her skill had been great indeed, and they were trivial even in comparison with the level of technique that Valentine, never Carabella’s equal as a juggler, once had mastered. But it was fair going, he thought, for someone who had not juggled seriously in close to a decade. Within an hour, rain soaked and sweat soaked though he was, he felt better than he had in months.

  Sleet appeared and, watching them, seemed to draw out of his anxiety and gloom; after a while he moved closer, and Carabella tossed a knife and a club and a hatchet to him, and he caught them casually and began to weave them into a lofty playful cascade to which he added three more things that Valentine sent his way. There was perhaps a shade of strain visible on Sleet’s face that would not have been there a decade ago—except when he was doing his famous routine of juggling blindfolded, maybe—but in no other way did he betray any lessening of his great skill. “Hoy!” he cried, sending the club and the hatchet back toward Valentine, and remorselessly sending other things Valentine’s way before the Coronal had caught the first. Then he and Valentine and Carabella went at it with very great seriousness indeed, as though they were wandering jugglers once more, and were rehearsi
ng for a performance before the royal court.

  Sleet’s display of virtuosity inspired Carabella to some intricate feats of her own, which led Sleet to call for some even more difficult maneuvers, and before long Valentine was totally out of his depth. All the same he attempted to keep up with them as long as he could, and did a creditable job at it, only dropping an occasional thing—until he found himself bombarded from both sides at once by a laughing Carabella and a cool, intense Sleet: and he found himself suddenly all elbows and no fingers, and allowed everything to go tumbling from his grasp.

  “Ah, my lord, that’s no way to do it!” boomed a harsh and wonderfully familiar voice.”

  “Zalzan Kavol?” Valentine cried in amazement and glee.

  The huge Skandar came bounding toward him, quickly making the starburst salute and then scooping up all the things that Valentine had dropped; and with a manic delight he began to toss them at Sleet and Carabella in that wild four-armed way of his that could push any human juggler, no matter how skilled, to the limits of his ability.

  Valentine looked deeper into the jungle and saw the others running through the rain: Lisamon Hultin, with the Vroon perched on her shoulder, Tunigorn, Tisana, Ermanar, Shanamir, and still more, erupting one after another from a battered and mud-splattered floater parked not far away. All of them had come, Valentine realized—everyone whom he had left behind in Gihorna, the entire party reunited at last. “Get out the wine!” he cried. “This calls for celebration!” He rushed among them, embracing this one and that, straining upward to throw his arms about the giantess, pummeling Shanamir joyfully, clasping hands solemnly with the dignified Ermanar, seizing Tunigorn in a hug that might have throttled a weaker man.