"There are hostile forces between us and the lake."
"The Coronal’s?"
"One would assume so, my lord. The scouts said only that they ascended Lumanzar Ridge, which gives a view of the lake and the surrounding plain, and saw troops camped there, and a considerable force of mollitors."
"War at last!" Lisamon Hultin cried. She sounded far from displeased.
"No," Valentine said somberly. "This is too early. We are thousands of miles from Castle Mount. We can hardly begin battling so far south. Besides, it’s still my hope to avoid warfare altogether — or at least to delay it until the last."
"What will you do, my lord?"
"Proceed north through the Glayge Valley, as we’ve been doing, but begin moving northwest if there’s any movement toward us by that army. I mean to go around them, if we can, and sail up the river behind them, leaving them sitting down at Roghoiz still waiting for us to appear."
Ermanar blinked. "Go around?"
"Unless I miss my guess, the Barjazid has put them there to guard the approach to the lake. They won’t follow us very far inland."
"But inland—"
"Yes, I know." Valentine let his hand rest lightly on Ermanar’s shoulder and said softly, with all the warmth and sympathy at his command, "Forgive me, friend, but I think we may have to detour as far from the river as Velalisier."
"Those ruins frighten me, my lord, and I am not the only one."
"Indeed. But we have a powerful wizard in our company, and many brave folk. What can a ghost or two do against the likes of Lisamon Hultin, of Khun or Kianimot, or Sleet, or Carabella? Or Zalzan Kavol? We’ll just let the Skandar roar at them a bit, and they’ll run all the way to Stoien!"
"My lord, your word is law. But since I was a boy I have heard dark tales of Velalisier."
"Have you ever been there?"
"Naturally not."
"Do you know anyone who has?"
"No, my lord."
"Can you say, then, that you have knowledge, certain knowledge, of the perils of the place?"
Ermanar toyed with the coils of his beard. "No, my lord."
"But ahead of us lies an army of our enemy, and a horde of ugly mollitors of war, eh? We have no idea what ghosts can do to us, but we’re quite sure of the troubles warfare can bring. I say sidestep the fighting, and take our chances with the ghosts."
"I would prefer it the other way round," said Ermanar, managing a smile. "But I will be at your side, my lord, even if you ask me to go on foot through Velalisier on a night of no moon. You may rely on that."
"I will," said Valentine. "And we will come forth from Velalisier unharmed by its phantoms, Ermanar. You may rely on that."
For the time being they continued on the road they had been traveling, keeping the Glayge to their right. The land gradually rose as they moved north — not yet the great surge that marked the foothills of Castle Mount, Valentine knew, but only a minor step-stage, an outer ripple of that vast up-thrusting of the planet’s skin. Soon the river lay a hundred feet below them in the valley, a narrow bright thread bordered by thick wild brush. And now the road wound by switchbacks up the side of a long tilted block of terrain that Ermanar said was Lumanzar Ridge, from the summit of which one could see for an extraordinary distance.
With Deliamber, Sleet, and Ermanar, Valentine went to the rim of the ridge to take stock of the situation. Below, the land swept away in natural terraced contours, level after level descending the ridge to the broad huge plain in which Lake Roghoiz was the centerpiece.
The lake looked enormous, almost an ocean. Valentine remembered it as large, as well it should be, for the Glayge drained the entire southwestern slope of Castle Mount and fed virtually all its waters into this lake; but the size he remembered was nothing like this. Now he knew why the towns at the lake’s margin all were built high on pilings: those towns now were no longer at the lake’s margin, but deep within its bounds, and the water must be lapping at the lower stories of the stilt-bottomed buildings. "It is much swollen," he said to Ermanar.
"Yes, almost twice its usual area, I think. Still, the tales we heard made it even worse."
"As is often the case," Valentine said. "And where is the army your scouts saw?"
Ermanar scanned the horizon a long moment with his seeing-tube. Perhaps, Valentine thought eagerly, they have packed up and gone back to the Mount, or maybe it was an error of the scouts, no army here at all, or possibly—"
There, my lord," Ermanar said finally.
Valentine took the tube and peered down the ridge. At first he saw only trees and meadows and stray outfloodings of the lake; but Ermanar directed the tube, and suddenly Valentine saw. To the naked eye the soldiers had seemed like a congregation of ants near the edge of the lake. But these were no ants.
Camped by the lake were perhaps a thousand troops, perhaps fifteen hundred — not a gigantic army, but large enough on a world where the concept of war was all but forgotten. They outnumbered Valentine’s forces several times over. Grazing nearby were eighty or a hundred mollitors — massive armor-plated creatures, of synthetic origins from the ancient days. In the knightly games on Castle Mount mollitors often were used as instruments of combat. They moved with surprising swiftness on their short thick legs, and were capable of great feats of destruction, poking their heavy black-jawed heads out of their impervious carapaces to snap and crush and rend. Valentine had seen them rip up an entire field with their fierce curved claws as they lumbered back and forth, crashing up against one another and butting heads in dull-witted rage. A dozen of them, blocking a road, would be as effective a barrier as a wall.
Sleet said, "We could take them by surprise, send one squad down to drive the mollitors into confusion, and swing around on them from the other side when—"
"No" Valentine said. "It would be a mistake to fight."
"If you think," Sleet persisted, "that you’re going to regain Castle Mount without anybody’s suffering so much as a cut finger, my lord, you—"
"I expect there to be bloodshed," said Valentine crisply. "But I intend to minimize it. Those troops down there are the troops of the Coronal; remember that, and remember who is truly Coronal. They are not the enemy. Dominin Barjazid is the only enemy. We will fight only when we must, Sleet."
"Change routes as planned, then?" Ermanar asked glumly.
"Yes. We go northwest, out toward Velalisier. Then swing around the far side of the lake, and up the valley toward Pendiwane, if there are no more armies waiting for us between here and there. Do you have maps?"
"Just of the valley and the road to Velalisier, perhaps halfway. The rest’s only wasteland, my lord, and the maps show very little."
"Then we’ll manage without maps," said Valentine. As the caravan moved back down Lumanzar Ridge to the crossroads that would take them away from the lake, Valentine summoned the brigand Duke Nascimonte to his car. "We are heading toward Velalisier," he said, "and may need to go right through it. Are you familiar with that area?"
"I was there once, my lord, when I was much younger."
"Looking for ghosts?"
"Looking for treasures of the ancients, to decorate my mansion-house. I found very little. The place must have been well plundered when it fell."
"You had no fears, then, of looting a haunted city?"
Nascimonte shrugged. "I knew the legends. I was younger, and not very timid."
"Speak with Ermanar," Valentine said, "and introduce yourself as one who has been to Velalisier and lived to tell the tale. Can you guide us through it?"
"My memories of the place are forty years old, my lord. But I’ll do my best."
Studying the patchy, incomplete maps Ermanar provided, Valentine concluded that the only road that would not take them perilously near the army waiting by the lake would in fact bring them almost to the edge of the ruined city, if not actually into it. He would not regret that. The Velalisier ruins, however much they terrified the credulous, were by all reports a noble sight; and
besides, Dominin Barjazid was unlikely to have troops waiting for him out there. The detour could be turned to advantage, if the false Coronal expected Valentine to take the predictable route up the Glayge: perhaps, if desert travel did not prove too taxing, they might be able to keep away from the river much of the way north, and gain the benefit of some surprise as they turned at last toward Castle Mount.
Let Velalisier produce what ghosts it may, Valentine thought. Better to dine with phantoms than to march down Lumanzar Ridge into the jaws of Barjazid’s mollitors.
—3—
THE ROAD AWAY FROM the lake led through increasingly more arid terrain. The thick dark alluvial soil of the flood-plain gave way to light, gritty, brick-red stuff that supported a skimpy population of gnarled and thorny plants. The road grew rougher here, no longer paved, just an irregular gravel-strewn track winding gradually upward into the low hills that divided the Roghoiz district from the desert of Velalisier Plain.
Ermanar sent out scouts, hoping to find a passable road on the lakeward side of the hills and thus avoid having to approach the ruined city. There was none, nothing but a few hunters’ trails crossing country too rugged for their vehicles. Over the hills it was, then, and down into the haunted regions beyond.
In late afternoon they began the descent of the far side. Heavy clouds were gathering — the trailing edge, perhaps, of some storm system now buffeting the upper Glayge Valley — and sunset, when it came, spread over the western sky like a great bloody stain. Just before darkness a rift appeared in the overcast and a triple beam of dark red light burst through, illuminating the plain, bathing in strange dreamlike radiance the sprawling immensity of the Velalisier ruins.
Great blocks of blue stone littered the landscape. A mighty wall of shaped monoliths, two and in some places three courses high, ran for more than a mile at the western edge of the city, ending abruptly in a heap of tumbled stone cubes. Closer at hand the outlines of vast shattered buildings still were visible, a whole forum of palaces and courtyards and basilicas and temples, half buried in the drifting sands of the plain. To the east rose a row of six colossal narrow-based sharp-topped pyramids set close together in a straight line, and the stump of a seventh, which had been dismantled apparently with furious energy, for its fragments lay strewn across a wide arc around it. Just ahead, where the mountain road made its entry into the city, were two broad stone platforms, eight or ten feet above the surface of the plain and wide enough for the maneuvers of a substantial army. In the distance Valentine saw the huge oval form of what might have been an arena, high-walled, many-windowed, breached at one end by a rough ragged gap. The scale of everything was astonishing, that and the enormous area. This place made the nameless ruins on the other side of the Labyrinth, where Duke Nascimonte had first found them, seem trivial indeed.
The rift in the clouds suddenly closed. The last daylight disappeared; the destroyed city became a place of mere formless confusion, chaotic humps against the desert skyline, as night descended.
Nascimonte said, "The road, my lord, runs between those platforms, through the group of buildings just behind them, and around the six pyramids, going out by the northeast side. It will be difficult to follow in the dark, even by moonlight."
"We won’t try to follow it in the dark. We’ll camp here and go through in the morning. I plan to explore the ruins tonight, as long as we’re here." That brought a grunt and a muffled cough from Ermanar. Valentine glanced at the little officer, whose face was drawn and bleak. "Courage," he murmured. "I think the ghosts will let us be, this evening."
"My lord, this is not a joking matter for me."
"I mean no mockery, Ermanar."
"You will go into the ruins alone?"
"Alone? No, I don’t think so. Deliamber, will you accompany me? Sleet? Carabella? Zalzan Kavol? And you, Nascimonte — you’ve survived them once; you have less to fear in there than any of us. What do you say?"
The bandit chieftain smiled. "I am yours to command, Lord Valentine."
"Good. And you, Lisamon?"
"Of course, my lord."
"Then we have a party of seven explorers. We’ll set out after dinner."
"Eight explorers, my lord," said Ermanar quietly.
Valentine frowned. "There’s scarcely any need for—"
"My lord, I swore to remain at your side until the Castle is yours again. If you go into the dead city, I go into the dead city with you. If the dangers are unreal, there is nothing to fear, and if they are real, my place is with you. Please, my lord."
Ermanar seemed entirely sincere. His face was tense, his expression strained, but more, Valentine thought, out of concern that he might be excluded from the expedition than out of fear of what might lurk in the ruins.
"Very well," said Valentine. "A party of eight." The moon was nearly full that evening, and its cold brilliant light illuminated the city in fine detail, mercilessly revealing the effects of thousands of years of abandonment in a way that the softer, more fantastical red glow of twilight had not. At the entrance, a worn and nearly illegible marker proclaimed Velalisier to be a royal historic preserve, by order of Lord Siminave the Coronal and the Pontifex Calintane. But they had ruled some five thousand years ago, and it did not seem as though much maintenance had been practiced here since their day. The stones of the two great platforms that flanked the road were cracked and uneven. In the furrows between them grew small ropy-stemmed weeds that with irresistible patience were prying the huge blocks apart: already in some places canyons were opening between block and block, wide enough for sizable shrubs to have taken root. Conceivably in another century or two a forest of twisted woody vegetation would hold possession of these platforms and the mighty square blocks would be wholly lost to view.
Valentine said, "All this must be cleared away. I’ll have the ruins restored to the way they were before this overgrowth began to sprout. How could such neglect have been permitted?"
"No one cares about this place," said Ermanar. "No one will lift a finger for this place."
"Because of the ghosts?" Valentine asked.
"Because it’s Metamorph," Nascimonte said. "That makes it doubly accursed."
"Doubly?"
"You don’t know the story, my lord?"
"Tell me."
Nascimonte said, "This is the legend I was raised on, at any rate. When the Metamorphs ruled Majipoor, Velalisier was their capital, oh, twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago. It was the greatest city on the planet. Two or three million of them lived here, and from all over Alhanroel came people of the outlying tribes, bringing tribute. They held Shapeshifter festivals on top of these platforms, and every thousand years they held a special festival, a superfestival, and to mark each of those they built a pyramid, so the city was at least seven thousand years old. But evil took hold here. I don’t know what sort of things a Metamorph would regard as evil, but whatever they were, they were practiced here. This was the capital city of all abominations. And the Metamorphs of the provinces grew disgusted, and then they grew outraged, and one day they marched in here and smashed the temples and pulled down most of the city walls and destroyed the places where the evils were practiced and drove the citizens into exile and slavery. We know they weren’t massacred, because there’s been plenty of treasure-digging here — I’ve done a little of it myself, as you know — and if there were a few million skeletons buried here, they’d have been found. So the place was torn apart and abandoned, long before the first humans came here, and a curse was put on it. The rivers that fed the city were dammed and diverted. The entire plain became a desert. And for fifteen thousand years no one has lived here except the ghosts of those who died when the city was destroyed."
"Tell the rest of it," said Ermanar.
Nascimonte shrugged. "That’s all I know, mate."
"The ghosts," Ermanar said. "Those who haunt here. Do you know how long they’re fated to wander the ruins? Until Metamorphs rule Majipoor again. Until the planet is returned to them, and the
last of us are made into slaves. And then Velalisier will be rebuilt on the old site, grander ever than it was before, and it’ll be reconsecrated as the Shapeshifter capital, and the spirits of the dead finally will be released from the stones that hold them trapped here."
"They’ll cling to the stones a long time, then," said Sleet. "Twenty billion of us and just a handful of them, living in the jungles — what kind of a threat is that?"
Ermanar said, "They’ve waited eight thousand years already, since Lord Stiamot broke their power. They’ll wait eight thousand more, if they have to. But they dream of Velalisier reborn, and they won’t give up that dream. Sometimes in sleep I’ve listened to them, planning for the day when the towers of Velalisier rise again, and it frightens me. That’s why I don’t like to be here. I feel them watching over the place — I can feel their hatred all around us, like something in the air, something invisible but real—"
"So this city is accursed by them and holy to them both at once," Carabella said. "Small wonder we have trouble comprehending how their minds work!"
Valentine wandered off down the path. The city awed him. He tried to imagine it as it had been, a kind of prehistoric Ni-moya, a place of majesty and opulence. And now? Lizards with beady clicking eyes scuttered from rock to rock. Weeds grew thick in the grand ceremonial boulevards. Twenty thousand years! What would Ni-moya look like in twenty thousand years? Or Pidruid, or Piliplok, or the fifty great cities on the slopes of Castle Mount? Were they building here on Majipoor a civilization that would endure forever, as the civilization of the old mother-world Earth was said to endure? Or, he wondered, would wide-eyed tourists someday prowl the shattered ruins of the Castle and the Labyrinth and the Isle, trying to guess what significance they had had to the ancients? We have done well enough so far, Valentine told himself, thinking back over the thousands of years of peace and stability. But now dissonances were breaking through; the ordered pattern of things had been disrupted; there was no telling what might befall. The Metamorphs, the defeated and evicted Metamorphs whose misfortune it had been to possess a world desired by other and stronger folk, might yet have the last laugh.
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