Lord Valentine's Castle

Sleet dropped anything, and he dropped no eggs tonight. As for the six Skandars, they had arranged themselves in a rigid star-pattern, standing with their backs to one another, and were juggling flaming torches. At carefully coordinated moments each would hurl a torch backward over his outer shoulder to his brother at the opposite side of the star. The interchanges were made with wondrous precision, the trajectories of the flying torches were flawlessly timed to create splendid crisscrossing patterns of light, and not a hair on any Skandar’s hide was scorched as they casually snatched from the air the firebrands that came hurtling past them from their unseen partners.

Round and round the stage they went, performing in stints of half an hour at a stretch, with five minutes to relax in the central well just below the stage, where hundreds of other off-duty artists gathered. Valentine longed to be doing something more challenging than his own little elementary juggle, but Zalzan Kavol had forbidden it: he was not yet ready, the Skandar said, though he was doing excellently well for a novice.

Morning came before the troupe was allowed to leave the stage. Payment here was by the hour, and hiring was governed by silent response-meters beneath the seats of the audience, monitored by cold-eyed Ghayrogs in a booth in the well. Some performers lasted only a few minutes before universal boredom or disdain banished them, but Zalzan Kavol and his company, who had been guaranteed two hours of work, remained on stage for four. They would have been kept for a fifth if Zalzan Kavol had not been dissuaded by his brothers, who gathered around him for a brief and intense argument.

'His greed,' Carabella said quietly, 'will lead him to embarrass himself yet. How long does he think people can throw those torches around before someone slips up? Even Skandars get tired eventually.'

'Not Zalzan Kavol, from the looks of it,' Valentine said.

'He may be a juggling machine, yes, but his brothers are mortal. Rovorn’s timing is starting to get ragged. I’m glad they had the courage to make a stand.' She smiled. 'And I was getting pretty tired too.'

So successfully were the jugglers received in Dulorn that they were hired for four additional days. Zalzan Kavol was elated — the Ghayrogs gave their entertainers high wages — and declared a five-crown bonus for everyone.

All well and good, Valentine thought. But he had no wish to settle in indefinitely among the Ghayrogs. After the second day, restlessness began to make him chafe.

'You wish to be moving on,' Deliamber said — a statement, not a question.

Valentine nodded. 'I begin to glimpse the shape of the road ahead of me.'

'To the Isle?'

'Why do you bother speaking with people,' Valentine said lightly, 'if you see everything within their minds?'

'I did no mind-peeking this time. Your next move is obvious enough.'

'Go to the Lady, yes. Who else can truly tell me who I am?'

'You still have doubts,' Deliamber said.

'I have no evidence other than dreams.'

'Which speak powerful truths.'

'Yes,' Valentine said, 'but dreams can be parables, dreams can be metaphors, dreams can be fantasies. It’s folly to speak them literally without confirmation. And the Lady can give confirmation, or so I hope. How far is it to the Isle, wizard?'

Deliamber briefly closed his large golden eyes. 'Thousands of miles,' he said. 'We are now perhaps a fifth of the way across Zimroel. You must make your way eastward through Khyntor or Velathys, and around the territory of the Metamorphs, and then perhaps by riverboat via Ni-moya to Piliplok, where the pilgrim-ships leave for the Isle.'

'How long will that take?'

'To reach Piliplok? At our present pace, about fifty years. Wandering with these jugglers, stopping here and there for a week at a time—'

'What if I left the troupe and went on my own?'

'Six months, possibly. The river journey is swift. The overland section takes much longer. If we had airships as they do on other worlds it would be a matter of a day or two to Piliplok, but of course we do without many devices on Majipoor that other people enjoy.'

'Six months?' Valentine frowned. 'And the cost, if I hired a vehicle and a guide?'

'Perhaps twenty royals. You’ll juggle a long time to earn that much.'

'When I get to Piliplok,' Valentine said, 'what then?'

'You book passage to the Isle. The voyage is a matter of weeks. When you reach the Isle you take lodging on the lowest terrace and begin the ascent.'

'The ascent?'

'A course of prayer, purification, and initiation. You move upward from terrace to terrace until you reach the Terrace of Adoration, which is the threshold to Inner Temple. You know nothing of any of this?'

'My mind, Deliamber, has been meddled with.'

'Of course.'

'At Inner Temple, then?'

'You are now an initiate. You serve the Lady as an acolyte, and if you seek an audience with her, you undergo special rites and await the summoning dream.'

Uneasily Valentine said, 'How long does this entire process take, the terraces, the initiation, the service as acolyte, the summoning dream?'

'It varies. Five years, sometimes. Ten. Forever, conceivably. The Lady has no time for each and every pilgrim.'

'And there’s no more direct way of gaining audience?'

Deliamber uttered the thick coughing sound that was his laugh. 'What? Knock on the temple door, cry out that you are her changeling son, demand entry?'

'Why not?'

'Because,' the Vroon said, 'the outer terraces of the Isle are designed as filters to keep such things from happening. There are no easy channels of communication to the Lady, and deliberately so. It would take you years.'

'I’d find a way.' Valentine stared levelly at the little wizard. 'I could reach her mind, if I were on the Isle. I could cry out to her, I could persuade her to summon me. Perhaps.'

'Perhaps.'

'With your assistance it could be done.'

'I feared that was coming,' said Deliamber dryly.

'You have some skill at making sendings. We could reach, if not the Lady herself, then those close to her. Step by step, drawing ourselves closer to her, cutting short the interminable process on the terraces—'

'It could be done, possibly,' Deliamber said. 'Do you believe I’m minded to make the pilgrimage with you, though?'

Valentine regarded the Vroon in silence for a long time.

'I’m certain of it,' he said finally. 'You play at reluctance, but you’ve engineered my every motive to impel me toward the Isle. With you at my side. Am I right? Eh, Deliamber? You’re more eager to have me get there than I am myself.'

'Ah,' the sorcerer said. 'It comes out now!'

'Am I right?'

'If you resolve to go to the Isle, Valentine, I will be at your side. But are you resolved?'

'Sometimes.'

'Intermittent resolutions lack potency,' said Deliamber.

'Thousands of miles. Years of waiting. Toil and intrigue. Why do I want to do this, Deliamber?'

'Because you are Coronal, and must be again.'

'The first may be true, though I have mighty doubts of it. The second is open to question.'

Deliamber’s look was crafty. 'You prefer to live under the rule of a usurper?'

'What’s the Cordial and his rule to me? He’s half a world away on Castle Mount and I’m a wandering juggler.' Valentine extended his fingers and stared at them as though he had never seen his hands before. 'I could spare myself much effort if I remained with Zalzan Kavol and let the other, whoever he may be, keep the throne. Suppose he’s a wise and just usurper? Where’s the benefit for Majipoor, if I do all this work merely to put myself back in his place? Oh, Deliamber, Deliamber, do I sound like a king at all, when I say these things? Where’s my lust for. power? How can I ever have been a ruler, when I so obviously don’t care about what’s happened?'

'We’ve spoken of this before. You have been tampered with, my lord. Your spirit as well as your face has been changed.'

'Even so. My royal nature, if ever I had one, is altogether gone from me. That lust for power—'

'Twice you’ve used the phrase,' Deliamber said. 'Lust has nothing to do with it. A true king doesn’t lust for power: responsibility lusts for him. And takes him, and possesses him. This Coronal is new, he has done little yet but make the grand processional, and already the people grumble at his early decrees. And you ask if he will be wise and just? How can any usurper be just? He is a criminal, Valentine, and he rules already with a criminal’s guilty fears eating at his dreams, and as time goes on those fears will poison him and he will be a tyrant. Can you doubt that? He will remove anyone who threatens him — will kill, even, if need be. The poison that courses in his veins will enter the life of the planet itself, will affect every citizen. And you, sitting here looking at your fingers, do you see no responsibility? How can you talk of sparing yourself much effort? As if it hardly matters who is the king. It matters very much who is the king, my lord, and you were chosen and trained for it, and not by lottery. Or do you believe anyone can become Coronal?'

'I do. By random stroke of fate.'

Deliamber laughed harshly. 'Possibly that was true nine thousand years ago. There is a dynasty, my lord.'

'An adoptive dynasty?'

'Precisely. Since the time of Lord Arioc, and maybe even earlier, Coronals have been chosen from among a small group of families, no more than a hundred clans, all of them dwellers on Castle Mount and close participants in the government. The next Coronal is already in training, though only he and a few advisers know who he is, and two or three replacements for him must also have been chosen. But now the line is broken, now an intruder has pushed his way in. Nothing but evil can