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, colouring 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.
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 towards 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
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 enquiry 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. “
