In any case he could not rid himself of the feeling that this place’s great legion of ghosts, in whom he did not even believe, were lurking all around him, and that their fury was still unappeased. Somehow he would have to deal with that fury, which had broken out now, so it seemed, in the form of a terrible act that had cost the life of a studious and inoffensive old man. The logic that infused every aspect of Valentine’s soul balked at any comprehension of such a thing. But his own fate, he knew, and perhaps the fate of the world, might depend on his finding a solution to the mystery that had exploded here.
“You will pardon me, good majesty,” said Tunigorn, breaking in on Valentine’s broodings just as a new maze of ruined streets opened out before them. “But if I take another step in this heat, I will fall down gibbering like a madman. My very brain is melting.”
“Why, then, Tunigorn, you should certainly seek refuge quickly, and cool it off! You can ill afford to damage what’s left of it, can you, old friend?” Valentine pointed in the direction of the camp. “Go back. Go. But I will continue, I think.”
He was not sure why. But something drove him grimly forward
across this immense bedraggled sprawl of sand-choked sun-blasted ruins, seeking he knew not what. One by one his other companions dropped away from him, with this apology or that, until only the indefatigable Lisamon Hultin remained. The giantess was ever-faithful. She had protected him from the dangers of Mazadone Forest in the days before his restoration to the Coronal’s throne. She had been his guardian in the belly of the sea-dragon that had swallowed them both in the sea off Piliplok, that time when they were shipwrecked sailing from Zimroel to Alhanroel, and she had cut him free and carried him up to safety. She would not leave him now. Indeed she seemed willing to walk on and on with him through the day and the night and the day that followed as well, if that was what he required of her.
But eventually even Valentine had had enough. The sun had long since moved beyond its noon height. Sharp-edged pools of shadow, rose and purple and deepest obsidian, were beginning to reach out all about him. He was feeling a little light-headed now, his head swimming a little and his vision wavering from the prolonged strain of coping with the unyielding glare of that blazing sun, and each street of tumbled-down buildings had come to look exactly like its predecessor. It was time to go back. Whatever penance he had been imposing on himself by such an exhausting journey through this dominion of death and destruction must surely have been fulfilled by now. He leaned on Lisamon Hultin’s arm now and again as they made their way toward the tents of the encampment.
Magadone Sambisa had assembled her eight Metamorph archaeologists. Valentine, having bathed and rested and had a little to eat, met with them just after sundown in his own tent, accompanied only by the little Vroon, Autifon Deliamber. He wanted to form his opinions of the Metamorphs undistracted by the presence of Nascimonte and the rest; but Deliamber had certain Vroonish wizardly skills that Valentine prized highly, and the small many-tentacled being might well be able to perceive things with those huge and keen golden eyes of his that would elude Valentine’s own human vision.
The Shapeshifters sat in a semicircle with Valentine facing them and the tiny wizened old Vroon at his left hand. The Pontifex ran his glance down the group, from the site boss Kaastisiik at one end to the paleographer Vo-Siimifon on the other. They looked back at him calmly, almost indifferently, these seven rubbery-faced slope-eyed Piurivars, as
he told them of the things he had seen this day, the cemetery and the shattered pyramid and the shrine beneath it, and the alcove where Huukaminaan’s severed head had been so carefully placed by his murderer.
“There was, wouldn’t you say, a certain formal aspect to the murder?” Valentine said. “The cutting of the body into pieces? The carrying of the head down to the shrine, the placement in the alcove of offerings?” His gaze fastened on Thiuurinen, the ceramics expert, a lithe, diminutive Metamorph woman with lovely jade-green skin. “What’s your reading on that?” he asked her.
Her expression was wholly impassive. “As a ceramicist I have no opinion at all.”
“I don’t want your opinion as a ceramicist, just as a member of the expedition. A colleague of Dr. Huukaminaan. Does it seem to you that putting the head there meant that some kind of offering was being made?”
“It is only conjecture that those alcoves were places of offering,” said Thiuurinen primly. “I am not in a position to speculate.”
Nor would she. Nor would any of them. Not Kaastisiik, not Vo-Siimifon, not the stratigrapher Pamikuuk, not Hieekraad, the custodian of material artifacts, nor Driismiil, the architectural specialist, nor Klelliin, the authority on Piurivar paleotechnology, nor Viitaal-Twuu, the specialist in metallurgy.
Politely, mildly, firmly, unshakably, they brushed aside Valentine’s hypotheses about ritual murder. Was the gruesome dismemberment of Dr. Huukaminaan a hearkening-back to the funereal practices of ancient Velalisier? Was the placing of his head in that alcove likely to have been any kind of propitiation of some supernatural being? Was there anything in Piurivar tradition that might countenance killing someone in that particular fashion? They could not say. They would not say. Nor, when he inquired as to whether their late colleague might have had an enemy here at the site, did they provide him with any information.
And they merely gave him the Piurivar equivalent of a shrug when he wondered out loud whether there could have been some struggle over the discovery of a valuable artifact that might have led to Huukaminaan’s murder; or even a quarrel of a more abstract kind, a fierce disagreement over the findings or goals of the expedition. Nobody
showed any sign of outrage at his implication that one of them might have killed old Huukaminaan over such a matter. They behaved as though the whole notion of doing such a thing were beyond their comprehension, a concept too alien even to consider.
During the course of the interview Valentine took the opportunity to aim at least one direct question at each of them. But the result was always the same. They were unhelpful without seeming particularly evasive. They were unforthcoming without appearing unusually sly or secretive. There was nothing overtly suspicious about their refusal to cooperate. They seemed to be precisely what they claimed to be: scientists, studious scholars, devoted to uncovering the buried mysteries of their race’s remote past, who knew nothing at all about the mystery that had erupted right here in their midst. He did not feel himself to be in the presence of murderers here.
And yet—and yet—
They were Shapeshifters. He was the Pontifex, the emperor of the race that had conquered them, the successor across eight thousand years of the half-legendary soldier-king Lord Stiamot, who had deprived them of their independence for all time. Mild and scholarly though they might be, these eight Piurivars before him surely could not help but feel anger, on some level of their souls, toward their human masters. They had no reason to cooperate with him. They would not see themselves under any obligation to tell him the truth. And—was this only his innate and inescapable racial prejudices speaking, Valentine wondered?—intuition told him to take nothing at face value among these people. Could he really trust the impression of apparent innocence that they gave? Was it possible ever for a human to read the things that lay hidden behind a Metamorph’s cool impenetrable features?
“What do you think?” he asked Deliamber, when the seven Shapeshifters had gone. “Murderers or not?”
“Probably not,” the Vroon replied. “Not these. Too soft, too citified. But they were holding something back. I’m certain of that.”
“You felt it too, then?”
“Beyond any doubt. What I sensed, your majesty—do you know what the Vroon word
hsirthiir
means?”
“Not really.”
“It isn’t easy to translate. But it has to do with questioning someone
who doesn’t intend to tell you any lies but isn’t necessarily going to tell you the truth, either, unless you know exactly how to call it forth. You pick up a powerful perception that there’s an important layer of meaning hidden somewhere beneath the surface of what you’re being told, but that you won’t be allowed to elicit that hidden meaning unless you ask precisely the right question to unlock it. Which means, essentially, that you already have to know the information that you’re looking for before you can ask the question that would reveal it. It’s a very frustrating sensation,
hsirthiir:
almost painful, in fact. It is like hitting one’s beak against a stone wall. I felt myself placed in a state of
hsirthiir
just now. Evidently so did you, your majesty.”
“Evidently I did,” said Valentine.
T
here was one more visit to make, though. It had been a long day and a terrible weariness was coming over Valentine now. But he felt some inner need to cover all the basic territory in a single sweep; and so, once darkness had fallen, he asked Magadone Sambisa to conduct him to the village of the Metamorph laborers.
She was unhappy about that. “We don’t usually like to intrude on them after they’ve finished their day’s work and gone back there, your majesty.”
“You don’t usually have murders here, either. Or visits from the Pontifex. I’d rather speak with them tonight than disrupt tomorrow’s digging, if you don’t mind.”
Deliamber accompanied him once again. At her own insistence, so did Lisamon Hultin. Tunigorn was too tired to go—his hike through the ruins at midday had done him in—and Mirigant was feeling feverish from a touch of sunstroke; but formidable old Duke Nascimonte readily agreed to ride with the Pontifex, despite his great age. The final member of the party was Aarisiim, the Metamorph member of Valentine’s security staff, whom Valentine brought with him not so much for protection—Lisamon Hultin would look after that—as for the
hsirthiir
problem.
Aarisiim, turncoat though he once had been, seemed to Valentine to be as trustworthy as any Piurivar was likely to be: he had risked his own life to betray his master Faraataa to Valentine in the time of the Rebellion, when he had felt that Faraataa had gone beyond all decency by threatening to slay the Metamorph queen. He could be helpful now,
perhaps, detecting things that eluded even Deliamber’s powerful perceptions.
The laborers’ village was a gaggle of meager wickerwork huts outside the central sector of the dig. In its flimsy makeshift look it reminded Valentine of Ilirivoyne, the Shapeshifter capital in the jungle of Zimroel, which he had visited so many years before. But this place was even sadder and more disheartening than Ilirivoyne. There, at least, the Metamorphs had had an abundance of tall straight saplings and jungle vines with which to build their ramshackle huts, whereas the only construction materials available to them here were the gnarled and twisted desert shrubs that dotted the Velalisier plain. And so their huts were miserable little things, dismally warped and contorted.
They had had advance word, somehow, that the Pontifex was coming. Valentine found them arrayed in groups of eight or ten in front of their shacks, clearly waiting for his arrival. They were a pitiful starved-looking bunch, gaunt and shabby and ragged, very different from the urbane and cultivated Metamorphs of Magadone Sambisa’s archaeological team. Valentine wondered where they found the strength to do the digging that was required of them in this inhospitable climate.
As the Pontifex came into view they shuffled forward to meet him, quickly surrounding him and the rest of his party in a way that caused Lisamon Hultin to hiss sharply and put her hand to the hilt of her vibration-sword.
But they did not appear to mean any harm. They clustered excitedly around him and to his amazement offered homage in the most obsequious way, jostling among themselves for a chance to kiss the hem of his tunic, kneeling in the sand before him, even prostrating themselves. “No,” Valentine cried, dismayed. “This isn’t necessary. It isn’t right.” Already Magadone Sambisa was ordering them brusquely to get back, and Lisamon Hultin and Nascimonte were shoving the ones closest to Valentine away from him. The giantess was doing it calmly, unhurriedly, efficiently, but Nascimonte was prodding them more truculently, with real detestation apparent in his fiery eyes. Others came pressing forward as fast as the first wave retreated, though, pushing in upon him in frantic determination.
So eager were these weary toil-worn people to show their obeisance to the Pontifex, in fact, that he could not help regarding their enthusiasm
as blatantly false, an ostentatious overdoing of whatever might have been appropriate. How likely was it, he wondered, that any group of Piurivars, however lowly and simple, would feel great unalloyed joy at the sight of the Pontifex of Majipoor? Or would, of their own accord, stage such a spontaneous demonstration of delight?
Some, men and women both, were even allowing themselves to mimic the forms of the visitors by way of compliment, so that half a dozen blurry distorted Valentines stood before him, and a couple of Nascimontes, and a grotesque half-sized imitation of Lisamon Hultin. Valentine had experienced that peculiar kind of honor before, in his Ilirivoyne visit, and he had found it disturbing and even chilling then. It distressed him again now. Let them shift shapes if they wished—they had that capacity, to use as they pleased—but there was something almost sinister about this appropriation of the visages of their visitors.