Suddenly he halted. What was that sound ahead? A footfall? And a flicker of shadow against the rocks? Valentine peered tensely into the darkness before him. An animal, he thought. Something nocturnal slithering around in search of a meal. Ghosts don’t have shadows, do they? Do they? There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts anywhere.
But all the same—
Cautiously he edged forward a few steps. Too dark here, too many avenues of tumbledown structures leading off to every side. He had laughed at Ermanar; but Ermanar’s fears had somehow insinuated themselves into his imagination. He had fantasies of austere mysterious Metamorphs gliding between the fallen buildings just beyond his vision — phantoms half as old as time — forms without bodies, shapes without substance—
And then footsteps, unmistakable footsteps, behind him—
Valentine whirled. Ermanar was trotting after him, that was all.
"Wait, my lord!"
Valentine allowed him to catch up. He forced himself to relax, though his fingers, strangely, were trembling. He put his hands behind his back.
"You ought not go off by yourself," Ermanar said. "I know you make light of the dangers I imagine here, but those dangers might yet exist. You owe it to us all to take more care of your safety, my lord."
The others rejoined him, and they continued on, slowly and in silence, through the moonlit ruins. Valentine said nothing of what he had thought he had seen and heard. Surely it had been only some animal. And shortly animals appeared: some sort of small apes, perhaps akin to forest-brethren, that nested in the fallen buildings and several times caused startlement as they went scrambling over the stones. And nocturnal mammals of a lower kind, mintuns or droles, darted swiftly through the shadows. But did apes and droles, Valentine wondered, make sounds like footfalls?
For more than an hour the eight moved deeper into the ruins. Valentine stared warily into the recesses and caverns, studying the pools of blackness with care.
As they passed through the fragments of a collapsed basilica, Sleet, who had gone off a short way by himself, jogged back in distress to tell Valentine, "I heard something strange to one side, in there."
"A ghost, Sleet?"
"It might be, for all I know. Or simply a bandit."
"Or a rock-monkey," Valentine said lightly. "I’ve heard all kinds of noises."
"My lord—"
"Are you catching Ermanar’s terrors now?"
"I think we have wandered here long enough, my lord," said Sleet in a low, taut voice.
Valentine shook his head. "We’ll keep close watch on dark corners. But there’s more to see here."
"I wish we would turn back now, my lord."
"Courage, Sleet."
The juggler shrugged and turned away. Valentine peered into the darkness. He did not underestimate the acuteness of Sleet’s hearing, he who juggled blindfolded by sheer sound alone. But to flee this place of marvels because they heard odd rustlings and footsteps in the distance — no, not so soon, not so hastily.
Yet, without communicating his uneasiness to the others, he moved still more cautiously. Ermanar’s ghosts might not exist, yet it was folly to be too rash in this strange city.
And as they were exploring one of the most ornate of the buildings in the central area of palaces and temples, Zalzan Kavol, who was leading the way, stopped short abruptly when a slab of rock, dislodged from above, came clattering down practically at his feet. He cursed and growled, "Those stinking apes—"
"No, not apes, I think," said Deliamber quietly. "There’s something bigger up there."
Ermanar flashed a light toward the overhanging ledge of an adjoining structure. For an instant a silhouette that might have been human was in view; then it vanished. Without hesitating Lisamon Hultin began to run to the far side of the building, followed by Zalzan Kavol, who brandished his energy-thrower. Sleet and Carabella went the other way. Valentine would have gone with them, but Ermanar caught him by the arm and held him with surprising strength, saying apologetically, "I may not permit you to place yourself in risk, my lord, when we have no idea—"
"Halt!" came the mighty booming voice of Lisamon Hultin.
There was the sound of a scuffle in the distance, and then that of someone clambering over the mounds of fallen masonry in no very ghostlike way. Valentine longed to know what was happening, but Ermanar was right: to go darting off after an unknown enemy in the darkness of an unfamiliar place was a privilege denied to the Coronal of Majipoor.
He heard grunts and cries, and a high-pitched sound of pain. Moments later Lisamon Hultin reappeared, dragging a figure who wore the starburst emblem of the Coronal on his shoulder. She had her arm locked about his chest and his feet were dangling six inches off the ground.
"Spies," she said. "Skulking around up there, keeping watch on us. There were two of them, I think."
"Where’s the other?" Valentine asked.
"Might have gotten away," said the giantess. "Zalzan Kavol went after him." She dumped her prisoner down before Valentine, and held him to the ground with a foot pressed against his middle.
"Let him up," Valentine said.
The man rose. He looked terrified. Brusquely Ermanar and Nascimonte checked him for weapons and found none.
"Who are you?" Valentine asked. "What are you doing here?"
No reply.
"You can speak. We won’t harm you. You have the starburst on your arm. Are you part of the Coronal’s forces?"
A nod.
"Sent out here to trail us?"
Again a nod.
"Do you know who I am?"
The man stared silently at Valentine.
"Are you able to speak?" Valentine asked. "Do you have a voice? Say something. Anything."
"I— if I—"
"Good. You can talk. Again: do you know who I am?"
In a thin whisper the captive replied, "They say you would steal the throne from the Coronal."
"No," Valentine said. "You have it wrong, fellow. The thief is he who sits now on Castle Mount. I am Lord Valentine, and I demand your allegiance."
The man stared, bewildered, uncomprehending.
"How many of you were up there?" Valentine asked.
"Please, sir—"
"How many?" Sullen silence.
"Let me twist his arm a little," Lisamon Hultin begged.
"That won’t be necessary." Valentine moved closer to the cowering man and said gently, "You understand nothing of this, but all will be made clear in time. I am the true Coronal, and by the oath you swore to serve me, I ask you now to answer. How many of you were up there?"
Conflicts raged in the man’s face. Slowly, reluctantly, be-wilderedly, he replied, "Just two of us, sir."
"Can I believe that?"
"By the Lady, sir!"
"Two of you. All right. How long were you following us?"
"Since — since Lumanzar."
"Under what orders?"
Hesitation again. "To — to observe your movements and report to camp in the morning."
Ermanar scowled. "Which means that other one is probably halfway to the lake by now."
"You think so?"
It was the rough, harsh voice of Zalzan Kavol. The Skandar strode into their midst and dumped down before Valentine, as though it were a sack of vegetables, the body of a second figure wearing the starburst emblem. Zalzan Kavol’s energy-thrower had seared a hole through him from back to front. "I chased him about half a mile, my lord. A quick devil he was, too! He was moving more easily than I over the heaps of stones, and starting to pull away from me. I ordered him to stop, but he kept going, and so—"
"Bury him somewhere off the path," Valentine said curtly.
"My lord? Did I do wrong to kill him?"
"You had no choice," Valentine said in a softer tone. "I wish you had managed to catch him. But you couldn’t, so you had no choice. Very well, Zalzan Kavol."
Valentine turned away. The
slaying had shaken him, and he could hardly pretend otherwise. This man had died only because he was loyal to the Coronal, or to the person he believed to be the Coronal.
The civil war had had its first casualty. The bloodshed had begun, here in this city of the dead.
—4—
THERE WAS NO THOUGHT of continuing the tour now. They returned with the prisoner to their camp. And in the morning Valentine gave orders to move on through Velalisier and begin the northeastward swing.
By day the ruined city seemed not as magical, although no less impressive. It was hard to understand how so frail and unmechanical a folk as the Metamorphs had ever moved these giant blocks of stone about; but perhaps twenty thousand years ago they had not been quite so unmechanical. The glowering Shapeshifters of the Piurifayne forests, those people of wicker huts and muddy streets, were only the broken remnant of the race that once had ruled Majipoor.
Valentine vowed to return here, once this business with Dominin Barjazid was settled, and explore the ancient capital in detail, clearing underbrush and excavating and reconstructing. If possible, he thought, he would invite Metamorph leaders to take part in that work — though he doubted they would care to cooperate. Something was needed to reopen lines of communication between the two populations of the planet.
"If I am Coronal again," he said to Carabella as the cavalcade rode past the pyramids and headed out of Velalisier, "I intend—"
"When you are Coronal again," she said.
Valentine smiled. "When I am Coronal again, yes. I intend to examine the entire problem of the Metamorphs. Bring them back into the mainstream of Majipooran life, if that can be done. Give them a place in the government, even."
"If they’ll have it."
"I mean to overcome that anger of theirs," said Valentine. "I’ll dedicate my reign to it. Our entire society, our wonderful and harmonious and loving realm, was founded on an act of theft and injustice, Carabella, and we’ve succeeded in teaching ourselves to overlook that."
Sleet glanced up. "The Shapeshifters weren’t making full use of this planet. There weren’t twenty million of them on the entire enormous place when our ancestors came here."
"But it was theirs!" Carabella cried. "By what right—"
"Easily, easily," Valentine said. "There’s no use fighting over the deeds of the first settlers. What’s done is done, and we must live with it. But it’s within our power to change the way we’ve been living with it, and if I’m Coronal again, I—"
"When," said Carabella.
"When," Valentine echoed.
Deliamber said mildly, in that far-off way of his that gained the immediate attention of all listeners, "It may be that the present troubles of the realm are the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs."
Valentine stared at him. "What do you mean by that?"
"Only that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account accumulates interest, you know. And now this usurpation, the evils of the new Coronal, the prospect facing us of war, death and destruction, chaos — perhaps the past is starting to send us its reckoning at last."
"But Valentine had nothing to do with the oppression of the Metamorphs," Carabella protested. "Why should he be the one to suffer? Why was he chosen to be cast down from power, and not some high-handed Coronal of long ago?"
Deliamber shrugged. "Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?"
"The Divine—"
"Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process."
"More than that," said Valentine suddenly. "It may be that I was chosen to be an instrument of Deliamber’s compensating forces, and it was necessary for me to suffer in order to be effective."
"How so?"
"If nothing unusual had ever happened to me, I might have ruled like all the others before me on Castle Mount, self-satisfied, amiable, accepting things as they were because from where I sat I saw no wrong in them. But these adventures of mine have given me a view of the world I’d never have had if I had remained snug in the Castle. And perhaps now I’m ready to play the role that needs to be played, whereas otherwise—" Valentine let his voice trail away. After a moment he said, "All this talk is mere vapor. The first thing to do is regain the Castle. Then we can debate the nature of the compensating forces of the universe and the tactics of the Divine."
He looked back at fallen Velalisier, the accursed city of the ancients, chaotic but yet magnificent on the forlorn desert plain. And then he turned away to sit in silence and contemplate the changing countryside ahead.
The road now curved about sharply toward the northeast, passing up and over the range of hills they had crossed to the south, and descending into the fertile flood-plain of the Glayge near the northernmost limb of Lake Roghoiz. They were emerging hundreds of miles north of the field where the Coronal’s army had been camped.
Ermanar, bothered by the presence of the two spies in Velalisier, had sent out scouts to ascertain that the army had not moved north to meet them. Valentine judged that a sensible move; but he did scouting of his own, by way of Deliamber.
"Cast me a spell," he ordered the wizard, "that will tell me where enemy armies lie in wait. Can you do that?"
The Vroon’s great shining golden eyes flickered in amusement. "Can I do that? Can a mount eat grass? Can a sea-dragon swim?"
"Then do it," said Valentine.
Deliamber withdrew and muttered words and waved his tentacles about, coiling and intertwining them in the most intricate of patterns. Valentine suspected that much of Deliamber’s sorcery was staged for the benefit of onlookers, that the real transactions did not involve the waving of tentacles or the muttering of formulas at all, but only the casting forth of Deliamber’s shrewd and sensitive consciousness to pick up the vibrations of outlying realities. But that was all right. Let the Vroon stage his little show. A certain amount of show business, Valentine recognized, was an essential lubricant in many civilized activities, not only those of wizards and jugglers, but those also of the Coronal, the Pontifex, the Lady, the King of Dreams, the speakers of dreams, the teachers of holy mysteries, perhaps even the customs-officials at the provincial boundaries and the sellers of sausages in streetside booths. In plying one’s trade one could not be too bald and blunt; one had to cloak one’s doings in magic, in theater.
Deliamber said, "The troops of the Coronal appear to remain where they were camped."
Valentine nodded. "Good. May they camp there a long while, waiting for us to return from our Velalisier excursion. Can you locate other armies north of here?"
"Not for a great distance," said Deliamber. "I feel the presence of knightly forces gathered on Castle Mount. But there always are. I detect minor detachments here and there in the Fifty Cities. But nothing unusual about that either. The Coronal has plenty of time. He’ll simply sit at the Castle and wait for you to approach. And then will come the grand mobilization. What will you do, Valentine, when a million warriors march down Castle Mount toward you?"
"Do you think I’ve given that no thought?"
"I know you’ve thought of little else. But it needs some heavy thinking about — our hundreds against their millions."
"A million is a clumsy size for an army," said Valentine easily. "Far simpler to do one’s juggling with clubs than with the trunks of dwikka-trees. Are you frightened of what lies ahead, Deliamber?"
"Not at all."
"Neither am I," Valentine said.
But of course there was show-business bravado, Valentine knew, in talk of that sort. Was he frightened? No, not really: death
comes to all, sooner or later, and to fear it is folly. Valentine knew he had little fear of death, for he had faced it in the forest near Avendroyne, and in the turbulent rapids of the Steiche, and in the belly of the sea-dragon and when wrestling with Farssal on the Isle, and on none of those occasions had he felt anything he could identify as fear. If the army that waited for him on Castle Mount overwhelmed his little force and cut him down, it would be regrettable — as being tumbled to pieces on the rocks of the Steiche would have been regrettable — but the prospect caused him no dread. What he did feel, and it was a more significant thing than fear for his own life, was a degree of fear for Majipoor. If he failed, through hesitation or foolishness or mere inadequacy of strength, the Castle would remain in the hands of the Barjazids, and the course of history would forever change, and ultimately billions of innocent beings would suffer. Preventing that was a high responsibility, and he felt the weight of it. If he died valiantly trying to scale Castle Mount, his hardships at least would be over; but the agonies of Majipoor would only just be beginning.
—5—
NOW THEY TRAVELED through placid rural districts, the perimeter of the great agricultural belt that flanked Castle Mount and supplied the Fifty Cities with produce. Valentine chose main highways at all times. The moment for secrecy was past; so conspicuous a caravan as this could hardly be concealed, and the time was at hand when the world had to learn that a struggle for possession of Lord Valentine’s Castle was about to commence.
The world was starting to learn it, in any case. Ermanar’s scouts, returning from the city of Pendiwane farther up the Glayge, brought news of the usurper’s first countermeasures.
"No armies lie between us and Pendiwane," Ermanar reported. "But posters are up in the city, branding you a rebel and a subversive, an enemy of society. The proclamations of the Pontifex in your favor have not yet been announced, it seems. Citizens of Pendiwane are being urged to band together in militias to defend their rightful Coronal and the true order of things against your uprising. And sendings are widespread."
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