But she would not stop. They were passing, now, a huge and very dilapidated edifice of gray stone that appeared ready to fall down if anyone should sneeze in its vicinity. “This is called the Palace of the Final King,” she said. “Probably an erroneous name, but that’s what the Piurivars call it, and for lack of a better one we do too.”
Valentine noted her careful use of the Metamorphs’ own name for themselves.
Piurivars,
yes. University people tended to be very formal about that, always referring to the aboriginal folk of Majipoor that way, never speaking of them as Metamorphs or Shapeshifters, as ordinary people tended to do. He would try to remember that.
As they came to the ruins of the royal palace she offered a disquisition on the legend of the mythical Final King of Piurivar antiquity, he who had presided over the atrocious act of defilement that had brought about the Metamorphs’ ancient abandonment of their city. It was a story with which all of them were familiar. Who did not know that dreadful tale?
But they listened politely as she told of how, those many thousands of years ago, long before the first human settlers had come to live on Majipoor, the Metamorphs of Velalisier had in some fit of blind madness hauled two living sea-dragons from the ocean: intelligent beings of mighty size and extraordinary mental powers, whom the Metamorphs themselves had thought of as gods. Had dumped them down on these platforms, had cut them to pieces with long knives, had burned their flesh on a pyre before the Seventh Pyramid as a crazed offering to some even greater gods in whom the King and his subjects had come to believe.
When the simple folk of the outlying provinces heard of that orgy of horrendous massacre, so the legend ran, they rushed upon Velalisier and demolished the temple at which the sacrificial offering had been made. They put to death the Final King and wrecked his palace, and drove the wicked citizens of the city forth into the wilderness, and smashed its aqueduct and put dams across the rivers that had supplied it with water, so that Velalisier would be thenceforth a deserted and accursed place, abandoned through all eternity to the lizards and spiders and jakkaboles of the fields.
Valentine and his companions moved on in silence when Magadone Sambisa was done with her narrative. The six sharply tapering pyramids that were Velalisier’s best-known monuments came now into view, the nearest rising just beyond the courtyard of the Final King’s palace, the other five set close together in a straight line stretching to the east. “There was a seventh, once,” Magadone Sambisa said. “But the Piurivars themselves destroyed it just before they left here for the last time. Nothing was left but scattered rubble. We were about to start
work there early last week, but that was when—when—” She faltered and looked away.
“Yes,” said Valentine softly. “Of course.”
The road now took them between the two colossal platforms fashioned from gigantic slabs of blue stone that were known to the modernday Metamorphs as the Tables of the Gods. Even though they were abutted by the accumulated debris of two hundred centuries, they still rose nearly ten feet above the surrounding plain, and the area of their flat-topped surfaces would have been great enough to hold hundreds of people at a time.
In a low sepulchral tone Magadone Sambisa said, “Do you know what these are, your majesty?”
Valentine nodded. “The sacrificial altars, yes. Where the Defilement was carried out.”
Magadone Sambisa said, “Indeed. It was also at this site that the murder of Huukaminaan happened. I could show you the place. It would take only a moment.”
She indicated a staircase a little way down the road, made of big square blocks of the same blue stone as the platforms themselves. It gave access to the top of the western platform. Magadone Sambisa dismounted and scrambled swiftly up. She paused on the highest step to extend a hand to Valentine as though the Pontifex might be having difficulty in making the ascent, which was not the case. He was still almost as agile as he had been in his younger days. But he reached for her hand for courtesy’s sake, just as she—deciding, maybe, that it would be impermissible for a commoner to make contact with the flesh of a Pontifex—began to pull it anxiously back. Valentine, grinning, leaned forward and took the hand anyway, and levered himself upward.
Old Nascimonte came bounding swiftly up just behind him, followed by Valentine’s cousin and close counselor, Prince Mirigant, who had the little Vroonish wizard Autifon Deliamber riding on his shoulder. Tunigorn remained below. Evidently this place of ancient sacrilege and infamous slaughter was not for him.
The surface of the altar, roughened by time and pockmarked everywhere by clumps of scruffy weeds and encrustations of red and green lichen, stretched on and on before them, a stupendous expanse. It was hard to imagine how even a great multitude of Shapeshifters, those
slender and seemingly boneless people, could ever have hauled so many tremendous blocks of stone into place.
Magadone Sambisa pointed to a marker of yellow tape in the form of a six-pointed star that was affixed to the stone a dozen feet or so away. “We found him here,” she said. “Some of him, at any rate. And some here.” There was another marker off to the left, about twenty feet farther on. “And here.” A third star of yellow tape.
“They dismembered him?” Valentine said, appalled.
“Indeed. You can see the bloodstains all about.” She hesitated for an instant. Valentine noticed that she was trembling now.
“All of him was here except his head. We discovered that far away, over in the ruins of the Seventh Pyramid.”
“They know no shame,” said Nascimonte vehemently. “They are worse than beasts. We should have eradicated them all.”
“Who do you mean?” asked Valentine.
“You know who I mean, majesty. You know quite well.”
“So you think this was Shapeshifter work, this crime?”
“Oh, no, majesty, no!” Nascimonte said, coloring the words with heavy scorn. “Why would I think such a thing? One of our own archaeologists must have done it, no doubt. Out of professional jealousy, let’s say, because the dead Shapeshifter had come upon on some important discovery, maybe, and our own people wanted to take credit for it.—Is that what you think, Valentine? Do you believe any human being would be capable of this sort of loathsome butchery?”
“That’s what we’re here to discover, my friend,” said Valentine amiably. “We are not quite ready for arriving at conclusions, I think.”
Magadone Sambisa’s eyes were bulging from her head, as though Nascimonte’s audacity in upbraiding a Pontifex to his face was a spectacle beyond her capacity to absorb. “Perhaps we should continue on to your tents now,” she said.
I
t felt very odd, Valentine thought, as they rode on down the rubblebordered roadway that led to the place of encampment, to be here in this forlorn and eerie zone of age-old ruins once again. But at least he was not in the Labyrinth. So far as he was concerned, any place at all was better than the Labyrinth.
This was his third visit to Velalisier. The first had been long ago when he had been Coronal, in the strange time of his brief overthrow
by the usurper Dominin Barjazid. He had stopped off here with his little handful of supporters—Carabella, Nascimonte, Sleet, Ermanar, Deliamber, and the rest—during the course of his northward march to Castle Mount, where he was to reclaim his throne from the false Coronal in the War of Restoration.
Valentine had still been a young man, then. But he was young no longer. He had been Pontifex of Majipoor, senior monarch of the realm, for nine years now, following upon the fourteen of his service as Coronal Lord. There were a few strands of white in his golden hair, and though he still had an athlete’s trim body and easy grace he was starting to feel the first twinges of the advancing years.
He had vowed, that first time at Velalisier, to have the weeds and vines that were strangling the ruins cleared away, and to send in archaeologists to excavate and restore the old toppled buildings. And he had intended to allow the Metamorph leaders to play a role in that work, if they were willing. That was part of his plan for giving those once-despised and persecuted natives of the planet a more significant place in Majipoori life; for he knew that Metamorphs everywhere were smoldering with barely contained wrath, and could no longer be shunted into the remote reservations where his predecessors had forced them to live.
Valentine had kept that vow. And had come back to Velalisier years later to see what progress the archaeologists had made.
But the Metamorphs, bitterly resenting Valentine’s intrusion into their holy precincts, had shunned the enterprise entirely. That was something he had not expected.
He was soon to learn that although the Shapeshifters were eager to see Velalisier rebuilt, they meant to do the job themselves—after they had driven the human settlers and all other offworld intruders from Majipoor and taken control of their planet once more. A Shapeshifter uprising, secretly planned for many years, erupted just a few years after Valentine had regained the throne. The first group of archaeologists that Valentine had sent to Velalisier could achieve nothing more at the site than some preliminary clearing and mapping before the War of the Rebellion broke out; and then all work there had had to be halted indefinitely.
The war had ended with victory for Valentine’s forces. In designing the peace that followed it he had taken care to alleviate as many of
the grievances of the Metamorphs as he could. The Danipiur—that was the title of their queen—was brought into the government as a full Power of the Realm, placing her on an even footing with the Pontifex and the Coronal. Valentine had, by then, himself moved on from the Coronal’s throne to that of the Pontifex. And now he had revived the idea of restoring the ruins of Velalisier once more; but he had made certain that it would be with the full cooperation of the Metamorph, and that Metamorph archaeologists would work side by side with the scholars from the venerable University of Arkilon in the north to whom he had assigned the task.
In the year just past great things had been done toward rescuing the ruins from the oblivion that had been encroaching on them for so long. But he could take little joy in any of that. The ghastly death that had befallen the senior Metamorph archaeologist atop this ancient altar argued that sinister forces still ran deep in this place. The harmony that he thought his reign had brought to the world might be far shallower than he suspected.
T
wilight was coming on by the time Valentine was settled in his tent. By a custom that even he was reluctant to set aside, he would stay in it alone, since his consort Carabella had remained behind in the Labyrinth on this trip. Indeed, she had tried very strongly to keep him from going himself. Tunigorn, Mirigant, Nascimonte, and the Vroon would share the second tent; the third was occupied by the security forces that had accompanied the Pontifex to Velalisier.
He stepped out into the gathering dusk. A sprinkling of early stars had begun to sparkle overhead, and the Great Moon’s bright glint could be seen close to the horizon. The air was parched and crisp, with a brittle quality to it, as though it could be torn in one’s hands like dry paper and crumbled to dust between one’s fingers. There was a strange stillness in it, an eerie hush.
But at least he was out-of-doors, here, gazing up at actual stars, and the air he breathed here, dry as it was, was
real
air, not the manufactured stuff of the Pontifical city. Valentine was grateful for that.
By rights he had no business being out and abroad in the world at all.
As Pontifex, his place was in the Labyrinth, hidden away in his secret imperial lair deep underground beneath all those coiling levels
of subterranean settlement, shielded always from the view of ordinary mortals. The Coronal, the junior king who lived in the lofty castle of forty thousand rooms atop the great heaven-piercing peak that was Castle Mount, was meant to be the active figure of governance, the visible representative of royal majesty on Majipoor. But Valentine loathed the dank Labyrinth where his lofty rank obliged him to dwell. He relished every opportunity he could manufacture to escape from it.
And in fact this one had been thrust unavoidably upon him. The killing of Huukaminaan was serious business, requiring an inquiry on the highest levels; and the Coronal Lord Hissune was many months’ journey away just now, touring the distant continent of Zimroel. And so the Pontifex was here in the Coronal’s stead.
“You love the sight of the open sky, don’t you?” said Duke Nascimonte, emerging from the tent across the way and limping over to stand by Valentine’s side. A certain tenderness underlay the harshness of his rasping voice. “Ah, I understand, old friend. I do indeed.”
“I see the stars so infrequently, Nascimonte, in the place where I must live.”
The duke chuckled. “
Must
live! The most powerful man in the world, and yet he’s a prisoner! How ironic that is! How sad!”
“I knew from the moment I became Coronal that I’d have to live in the Labyrinth eventually,” Valentine said. “I’ve tried to make my peace with that. But it was never my plan to be Coronal in the first place, you know. If Voriax had lived—”
“Ah, yes, Voriax—” Valentine’s brother, the elder son of the High Counselor Damiandane: the one who had been reared from childhood to occupy the throne of Majipoor. Nascimonte gave Valentine a close look. “It was a Metamorph, was it not, who struck him down in the forest? That has been proven now?”