'The flooding is not as severe as we had heard,' Ermanar said.
Valentine nodded. 'Excellent. We’ll continue on to the lake, then, and take ship there?'
'There are hostile forces between us and the lake.'
'The Coronal’s?'
'One would assume so, my lord. The scouts said only that they ascended Lumanzar Ridge, which gives a view of the lake and the surrounding plain, and saw troops camped there, and a considerable force of mollitors.'
'War at last!' Lisamon Hultin cried. She sounded far from displeased.
'No,' Valentine said somberly. 'This is too early. We are thousands of miles from Castle Mount. We can hardly begin battling so far south. Besides, it’s still my hope to avoid warfare altogether — or at least to delay it until the last.'
'What will you do, my lord?'
'Proceed north through the Glayge Valley, as we’ve been doing, but begin moving northwest if there’s any movement toward us by that army. I mean to go around them, if we can, and sail up the river behind them, leaving them sitting down at Roghoiz still waiting for us to appear.'
Ermanar blinked. 'Go
'Unless I miss my guess, the Barjazid has put them there to guard the approach to the lake. They won’t follow us very far inland.'
'But inland—'
'Yes, I know.' Valentine let his hand rest lightly on Ermanar’s shoulder and said softly, with all the warmth and sympathy at his command, 'Forgive me, friend, but I think we may have to detour as far from the river as Velalisier.'
'Those ruins frighten me, my lord, and I am not the only one.'
'Indeed. But we have a powerful wizard in our company, and many brave folk. What can a ghost or two do against the likes of Lisamon Hultin, of Khun or Kianimot, or Sleet, or Carabella? Or Zalzan Kavol? We’ll just let the Skandar roar at them a bit, and they’ll run all the way to Stoien!'
'My lord, your word is law. But since I was a boy I have heard dark tales of Velalisier.'
'Have you ever been there?'
'Naturally not.'
'Do you know anyone who has?'
'No, my lord.'
'Can you say, then, that you have knowledge, certain knowledge, of the perils of the place?'
Ermanar toyed with the coils of his beard. 'No, my lord.'
'But ahead of us lies an army of our enemy, and a horde of ugly mollitors of war, eh? We have no idea what ghosts can do to us, but we’re quite sure of the troubles warfare can bring. I say sidestep the fighting, and take our chances with the ghosts.'
'I would prefer it the other way round,' said Ermanar, managing a smile. 'But I will be at your side, my lord, even if you ask me to go on foot through Velalisier on a night of no moon. You may rely on that.'
'I will,' said Valentine. 'And we will come forth from Velalisier unharmed by its phantoms, Ermanar. You may rely on that.'
For the time being they continued on the road they had been traveling, keeping the Glayge to their right. The land gradually rose as they moved north — not yet the great surge that marked the foothills of Castle Mount, Valentine knew, but only a minor step-stage, an outer ripple of that vast up-thrusting of the planet’s skin. Soon the river lay a hundred feet below them in the valley, a narrow bright thread bordered by thick wild brush. And now the road wound by switchbacks up the side of a long tilted block of terrain that Ermanar said was Lumanzar Ridge, from the summit of which one could see for an extraordinary distance.
With Deliamber, Sleet, and Ermanar, Valentine went to the rim of the ridge to take stock of the situation. Below, the land swept away in natural terraced contours, level after level descending the ridge to the broad huge plain in which Lake Roghoiz was the centerpiece.
The lake looked enormous, almost an ocean. Valentine remembered it as large, as well it should be, for the Glayge drained the entire southwestern slope of Castle Mount and fed virtually all its waters into this lake; but the size he remembered was nothing like this. Now he knew why the towns at the lake’s margin all were built high on pilings: those towns now were no longer at the lake’s margin, but deep within its bounds, and the water must be lapping at the lower stories of the stilt- bottomed buildings. 'It is much swollen,' he said to Ermanar.
'Yes, almost twice its usual area, I think. Still, the tales we heard made it even worse.'
'As is often the case,' Valentine said. 'And where is the army your scouts saw?'
Ermanar scanned the horizon a long moment with his seeing-tube. Perhaps, Valentine thought eagerly, they have packed up and gone back to the Mount, or maybe it was an error of the scouts, no army here at all, or possibly—'
There, my lord,' Ermanar said finally.
Valentine took the tube and peered down the ridge. At first he saw only trees and meadows and stray outfloodings of the lake; but Ermanar directed the tube, and suddenly Valentine saw. To the naked eye the soldiers had seemed like a congregation of ants near the edge of the lake. But these were no ants.
Camped by the lake were perhaps a thousand troops, perhaps fifteen hundred — not a gigantic army, but large enough on a world where the concept of war was all but forgotten. They outnumbered Valentine’s forces several times over. Grazing nearby were eighty or a hundred mollitors — massive armor-plated creatures, of synthetic origins from the ancient days. In the knightly games on Castle Mount mollitors often were used as instruments of combat. They moved with surprising swiftness on their short thick legs, and were capable of great feats of destruction, poking their heavy black-jawed heads out of their impervious carapaces to snap and crush and rend. Valentine had seen them rip up an entire field with their fierce curved claws as they lumbered back and forth, crashing up against one another and butting heads in dull-witted rage. A dozen of them, blocking a road, would be as effective a barrier as a wall.
Sleet said, 'We could take them by surprise, send one squad down to drive the mollitors into confusion, and swing around on them from the other side when —'
'No' Valentine said. 'It would be a mistake to fight.'
'If you think,' Sleet persisted, 'that you’re going to regain Castle Mount without anybody’s suffering so much as a cut finger, my lord, you—'
'I expect there to be bloodshed,' said Valentine crisply. 'But I intend to minimize it. Those troops down there are the troops of the Coronal; remember that, and remember who is truly Coronal. They are not the enemy. Dominin Barjazid is the only enemy. We will fight only when we must, Sleet.'
'Change routes as planned, then?' Ermanar asked glumly.
'Yes. We go northwest, out toward Velalisier. Then swing around the far side of the lake, and up the valley toward Pendiwane, if there are no more armies waiting for us between here and there. Do you have maps?'
'Just of the valley and the road to Velalisier, perhaps halfway. The rest’s only wasteland, my lord, and the maps show very little.'
'Then we’ll manage without maps,' said Valentine. As the caravan moved back down Lumanzar Ridge to the crossroads that would take them away from the lake, Valentine summoned the brigand Duke Nascimonte to his car. 'We are heading toward Velalisier,' he said, 'and may need to go right through it. Are you familiar with that area?'
'I was there once, my lord, when I was much younger.'
'Looking for ghosts?'
'Looking for treasures of the ancients, to decorate my mansion-house. I found very little. The place must have been well plundered when it fell.'
'You had no fears, then, of looting a haunted city?'
Nascimonte shrugged. 'I knew the legends. I was younger, and not very timid.'
'Speak with Ermanar,' Valentine said, 'and introduce yourself as one who has been to Velalisier and lived to tell the tale. Can you guide us through it?'
'My memories of the place are forty years old, my lord. But I’ll do my best.'
Studying the patchy, incomplete maps Ermanar provided, Valentine concluded that the only road that would not take them perilously near the army waiting by the lake would in fact bring them almost to the edge of the ruined city, if not actually into it. He would not regret that. The Velalisier ruins, however much they terrified the credulous, were by all reports a noble sight; and besides, Dominin Barjazid was unlikely to have troops waiting for him out there. The detour could be turned to advantage, if the false Coronal expected Valentine to take the predictable route up the Glayge: perhaps, if desert travel did not prove too taxing, they might be able to keep away from the river much of the way north, and gain the benefit of some surprise as they turned at last toward Castle Mount.
Let Velalisier produce what ghosts it may, Valentine thought. Better to dine with phantoms than to march down Lumanzar Ridge into the jaws of Barjazid’s mollitors.
—3—
THE ROAD AWAY FROM the lake led through increasingly more arid terrain. The thick dark alluvial soil of the flood-plain gave way to light, gritty, brick-red stuff that supported a skimpy population of gnarled and thorny plants. The road grew rougher here, no longer paved, just an irregular gravel-strewn track winding gradually upward into the low hills that divided the Roghoiz district from the desert of Velalisier Plain.
Ermanar sent out scouts, hoping to find a passable road on the lakeward side of the hills and thus avoid having to approach the ruined city. There was none, nothing but a few hunters’ trails crossing country too rugged for their vehicles. Over the hills it was, then, and down into the haunted regions beyond.
In late afternoon they began the descent of the far side. Heavy clouds were gathering — the trailing edge, perhaps, of some storm system now buffeting the upper Glayge Valley — and sunset, when it came, spread over the western sky like a great bloody stain. Just before darkness a rift appeared in the overcast and a triple beam of dark red light burst through, illuminating the plain, bathing in strange dreamlike radiance the sprawling immensity of the Velalisier ruins.
Great blocks of blue stone littered the landscape. A mighty wall of shaped monoliths, two and in some places three courses high, ran for more than a mile at the western edge of the city, ending abruptly in a heap of tumbled stone cubes. Closer at hand the outlines of vast shattered buildings still were visible, a whole forum of palaces and courtyards and basilicas and temples, half buried in the drifting sands of the plain. To the east rose a row of six colossal narrow-based sharp-topped pyramids set close together in a straight line, and the stump of a seventh, which had been dismantled apparently with furious energy, for its fragments lay strewn
