Lord Valentine's Castle

'Not money,' the Ghayrog said disdainfully. 'An offering. '

Valentine was baffled. In confusion he looked toward Deliamber, who moved his tentacles, waving several of them up and down in a rhythmic tossing gesture. Valentine frowned. Then he understood. Juggling!

'Sleet — Zalzan Kavol—'

From one of the cars they brought clubs and balls. Sleet, Carabella, and Zalzan Kavol stationed themselves before the guardians and, at a signal from the Skandar, began to juggle. Motionless as statues, the seven masked ones watched. The entire proceeding seemed so preposterous to Valentine that he was hard put to keep a straight face, and several times had to choke back giggles; but the three jugglers performed their routines austerely and with the utmost dignity, as though this were some crucial religious rite. They went through three complete patterns of interchange and stopped with one accord, bowing stiffly to the guardians. The Ghayrog nodded almost imperceptibly — the only acknowledgment of the performance.

'You may enter,' he said.

—5—

THEY DROVE THE FLOATERS between the blades and into a sort of vestibule, dark and musty, that opened into a wide sloping roadway. A short distance down that and they intersected a curving tunnel, the first of the rings of the Labyrinth.

It was high-roofed and brightly lit, and could well have been a market street in any busy city, with stalls and shops and pedestrian traffic and vehicles of all shapes and sizes floating along. But a moment’s careful inspection made it clear that this was no Pidruid, no Piliplok, no Ni-moya. The people in the streets were eerily pale, with a ghostly look that told of lifetimes spent away from the rays of the sun. Their clothing was curiously archaic in style, and of dull, dark colors. There were many masked individuals, servants of the pontifical bureaucracy, unremarkable in the context of the Labyrinth and moving in the crowds without attracting the slightest attention for their maskedness. And, thought Valentine, everyone, masked and maskless alike, had a tense and drawn expression, a strange haunted look about the eyes and mouth. Out in the world of fresh air, under the warm and cheerful sun, people on Majipoor smiled freely and easily, not only with their mouths but with their eyes, their cheeks, their entire faces, their whole souls. Down in this catacomb souls were of a different sort.

Valentine turned to Deliamber. 'Do you know your way around in this place?'

'Not at all. But guides should be easily come by.'

'How?'

'Halt the cars, get out, stand around, look befuddled,' the Vroon said. 'You’ll have guides aplenty in a minute.'

It took less than that. Valentine, Sleet, and Carabella left their car, and instantly a boy no more than ten, who had been running along the street with some younger children, whirled about and called, 'Show you the Labyrinth? One crown, all day!'

'Do you have an older brother?' Sleet asked.

The boy glared at him. 'You think I’m too young? Go on, then! Find your own way around! You’ll be lost in five minutes!'

Valentine laughed. 'What’s your name?'

'Hissune.'

'How many levels must we go, Hissune, before we reach the government sector?'

'You want to go there?'

'Why not?'

'They’re all crazy there,' the boy said, grinning. 'Work, work, shuffle papers all day long, mumble and mutter, work hard and hope you’ll get promoted even deeper down. Talk to them and they don’t even answer you. Minds all mumbly from too much work. It’s seven levels under. Court of Columns first, Hall of Winds, Place of Masks, Court of Pyramids, Court of Globes, the Arena, and then you get to the House of Records. I’ll take you there. Not for one crown, though.'

'How much?'

'Half a royal.'

Valentine whistled. 'What would you do with so much money?'

'Buy my mother a cloak, and light five candles to the Lady, and get my sister the medicine she needs.' The boy winked. 'And maybe a treat or two for myself.'

During this exchange a goodly crowd had gathered — at least fifteen or twenty children no older than Hissune, some younger ones, and some adults, all clustered together in a tight semicircle and watching tensely to see if Hissune got the job. None of them called out, but out of the corner of his eye Valentine saw them straining for his attention, standing on tiptoes, trying to look knowledgeable and responsible. If he refused the boy’s offer, he would have fifty more the next moment, a wild clamor of voices and a forest of waving hands. But Hissune seemed to know his business, and his blunt, coolly cynical approach had charm.

'All right,' Valentine said. 'Take us to the House of Records.'

'All these cars yours?'

'That one, that, that — yes, all.'

Hissune whistled. 'Are you important? Where are you from?'

'Castle Mount.'

'I guess you’re important,' the boy conceded. 'But if you come from Castle Mount, what are you doing on the Blades side of the Labyrinth?'

The boy was clever. Valentine said, 'We’ve been traveling. We’ve just come from the Isle.'

'Ah.' Hissune’s eyes widened just for an instant, the first breach in his jaunty street-wise coolness. Doubtless the Isle was a virtually mythical place to him, as far off as the farthest stars, and despite himself he showed awe at finding himself in the presence of someone who had actually been there. He moistened his lips. 'And how shall I call you?' he asked after a moment.

'Valentine.'

'Valentine,' the boy repeated. 'Valentine from Castle Mount. Very nice name.' He clambered into the first floater-car. As Valentine got in beside him Hissune said, 'Really? Valentine?'

'Really.'

'Very nice name,' he said again. 'Pay me half a royal, Valentine, and I’ll show you the Labyrinth.'

Half a royal, Valentine knew, was outrageous, several days’ pay for a skilled artisan, and yet he made no objection: it seemed improper for someone of his station to be haggling with a child over money. Hissune, perhaps, had calculated the same thing. In any event the fee turned out to be a worthwhile investment, for the boy proved expert in the twists and turns of the Labyrinth, guiding them with surprising swiftness toward the lower and inner coils of the place. Down they went, down and around, making unexpected turns and shortcuts through narrow, barely manageable alleyways, descending on hidden ramps that seemed to make transit across implausible gulfs of space.

The Labyrinth grew darker and more intricate as they went downward. Only the outermost level was well lit. The circles within it were shadowy and sinister, with dim corridors radiating in unlikely directions from the main ones, and hints of strange statuary and architectural ornamentation vaguely visible in the musty, dismal corners. Valentine found the place disturbing. It reeked of mildew and history; it had the chill clamminess of unimaginable antiquity; it was sunless and airless and joyless, a giant cavern of forlorn dreary gloom, through which scowling harsh-eyed figures moved on errands as mysterious as their own somber selves. Down — down — down—

The boy maintained a constant flow of chatter. He was marvelously articulate, lively and funny, somehow not at all a proper product of this morbid place. He told of tourists from Ni-moya who had been lost between the Hall of Winds and Place of Masks for a month, living on scraps provided by lower-level dwellers, but too proud to admit they were unable to find their way out. He told of the architect of the Court of Globes who had aligned every spheroid in that elaborate chamber with regard to some monumentally complex numerological system, only to find that the workmen, having lost the key to his charts, had installed everything according to an improvised system of their own: he had bankrupted himself to rebuild the whole thing in the right deployment at his own expense, discovering in the end that his computations were wrong and the pattern was impossible. 'They buried him right where he fell,' said Hissune. And the boy told the tale of the Pontifex Arioc, he who had, when a vacancy developed in the Ladyship, proclaimed himself female, appointed himself to the Isle, and abdicated his throne: barefoot and clad in loose flowing robes, the boy said, Arioc marched publicly out of the depths of the Labyrinth, followed by a cluster of his highest ministers, who frantically tried to dissuade him from his course. 'On this spot,' said Hissune, 'he called the people together and told them he was now their Lady, and ordered up a chariot to take him to Stoien. And the ministers could do nothing. Nothing! I wish I had seen their faces.'

Down—

All day the caravan descended. They passed through the Court of Columns, where thousands of huge gray pillars sprouted like titanic toadstools, and sluggish pools of oily black water covered the stone floor to a depth of three or four feet. They crossed the Hall of Winds, a terrifying place where cold gusts of air streamed inexplicably from finely carved stone grids in the walls. They saw the Place of Masks, a twisting corridor in which giant bodiless faces, with blind empty slits for eyes, stood mounted on marble plinths. They viewed the Court of Pyramids, a forest of stark white polyhedral figures set so close together that it was impossible to move between them, a spiky-tipped maze of monoliths, some perfectly tetrahedral but most weirdly elongated, spindly, ominous. A level below it they wandered in the celebrated Court of Globes, an even more complex structure a mile and a half long, where spherical objects, some no larger than a fist and others as big as great sea- dragons, hung eerily and invisibly suspended, illuminated from below. Hissune took care to point out the architect’s grave — unmarked, a slab of black stone beneath the greatest of the globes. Down — down—

Valentine had seen nothing of this on his earlier visit. From the Mouth of Waters one descended swiftly, through passageways used only by the Coronal and Pontifex, to the imperial lair at the heart of the Labyrinth.

Someday, thought Valentine, if I am Coronal again, it will happen that I must succeed Tyeveras as Pontifex. And when that day comes I will let the people know that I do not choose to live in the Labyrinth, but will build a palace for myself in some more cheering place.

He smiled. He wondered how many Coronals before him, seeing the hideous enormity of the Labyrinth, had vowed the same vow. And yet somehow they all, sooner or later, withdrew from the world and took up residence down here. It was easy enough now, when he was young and full of vitality, to make such