Tales of Majipoor (32 page)

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 counsellor, 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 incrustations 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 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.

It felt very odd, Valentine thought, as they rode on down the rubble-bordered 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 smouldering 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 Metamorphs, 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.

Twilight 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 Counsellor 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?” Uncomfortably Valentine said, “What does it matter now who killed him? He died. And the throne came to me, because I was our father’s other son. A crown I had never dreamed of wearing. Everyone knew that Voriax was the one who was destined for it.”

“But he had a darker destiny also. Poor Voriax!”

Poor Voriax, yes. Struck down by a bolt out of nowhere while hunting in the forest eight years into his reign as Coronal, a bolt from the bow of some Metamorph assassin skulking in the trees. By accepting of his dead brother’s crown, Valentine had doomed himself inevitably to descend into the Labyrinth some day, when the old Pontifex died and it became the Coronal’s turn to succeed to the greater title, and to the cheerless obligation of underground residence that went with it.

“As you say, it was the decision of fate,” Valentine replied, “and now I am Pontifex. Well, so be it, Nascimonte. But I won’t hide down there in the darkness all the time. I can’t.”

“And why should you? The Pontifex can do as he pleases.”

“Yes. Yes. But only within our law and custom.”

“You shape law and custom to suit yourself, Valentine. You always have.”

Valentine understood what Nascimonte was saying. He had never been a conventional monarch. For much of the time during his exile from power in the period of the usurpation he had wandered the world earning a humble living as an itinerant juggler, kept from awareness of his true rank by the amnesia that the usurping faction had induced in him. Those years had transformed him irreversibly; and after his restoration to the royal heights of Castle Mount he had comported himself in a way that few Coronals ever had before – mingling openly with the populace, spreading a cheerful gospel of peace and love even as the Shapeshifters were making ready to launch their long-cherished campaign of war against the conquerors who had taken their world from them.

And then, when the events of that war made Valentine’s succession to the Pontificate unavoidable, he had held back as long as possible before relinquishing the upper world to his protege Lord Hissune, the new Coronal, and descending into the subterranean city that was so alien to his sunny nature.

In his nine years as Pontifex he had found every excuse to emerge from it. No Pontifex in memory had come forth from the Labyrinth more than once a decade or so, and then only to attend high rites at the castle of the Coronal; but Valentine popped out as often as he could, riding hither and thither through the land as though he were still obliged to undertake the formal grand processionals across the countryside that a Coronal must make. Lord Hissune had been very patient with him on each of those occasions, though Valentine had no doubt that the young Coronal was annoyed by the senior monarch’s insistence on coming up into public view so frequently.

“I change what I think needs changing,” Valentine said. “But I owe it to Lord Hissune to keep myself out of sight as much as possible.”

“Well, here you are above ground today, at any rate!”

“It seems that I am. This is one time, though, when I would gladly have forgone the chance to come forth. But with Hissune off in Zimroel—”

“Yes. Clearly you had no choice. You had to lead this investigation yourself.” They fell silent. “A nasty mess, this murder,” Nascimonte said, after a time. “Pfaugh! Pieces of the poor bastard strewn all over the altar like that!”

“Pieces of the government’s Metamorph policy, too, I think,” said the Pontifex, with a rueful grin.

“You think there’s something political in this, Valentine?”

“Who knows? But I fear the worst.”

“You, the eternal optimist!”

“It would be more accurate to call me a realist, Nascimonte. A realist.”

The old duke laughed. “As you prefer, majesty.” There was another pause, a longer one than before. Then Nascimonte said, more quietly, now, “Valentine, I need to ask your forgiveneness for an earlier fault. I spoke too harshly, this afternoon, when I talked of the Shapeshifters as vermin who should be exterminated. You know I don’t truly believe that. I’m an old man. Sometimes I speak so bluntly that I amaze even myself.” Valentine nodded, but made no other reply.

“And telling you so dogmatically that it had to be one of his fellow Shapeshifters who killed him, too. As you said, it’s out of line for us to be jumping to conclusions that way. We haven’t even started to collect evidence yet. At this point we have no justification for assuming—”