across a wide arc around it. Just ahead, where the mountain road made its entry into the city, were two broad stone platforms, eight or ten feet above the surface of the plain and wide enough for the maneuvers of a substantial army. In the distance Valentine saw the huge oval form of what might have been an arena, high-walled, many-windowed, breached at one end by a rough ragged gap. The scale of everything was astonishing, that and the enormous area. This place made the nameless ruins on the other side of the Labyrinth, where Duke Nascimonte had first found them, seem trivial indeed.
The rift in the clouds suddenly closed. The last daylight disappeared; the destroyed city became a place of mere formless confusion, chaotic humps against the desert skyline, as night descended.
Nascimonte said, 'The road, my lord, runs between those platforms, through the group of buildings just behind them, and around the six pyramids, going out by the northeast side. It will be difficult to follow in the dark, even by moonlight.'
'We won’t try to follow it in the dark. We’ll camp here and go through in the morning. I plan to explore the ruins tonight, as long as we’re here.' That brought a grunt and a muffled cough from Ermanar. Valentine glanced at the little officer, whose face was drawn and bleak. 'Courage,' he murmured. 'I think the ghosts will let us be, this evening.'
'My lord, this is not a joking matter for me.'
'I mean no mockery, Ermanar.'
'You will go into the ruins alone?'
'Alone? No, I don’t think so. Deliamber, will you accompany me? Sleet? Carabella? Zalzan Kavol? And you, Nascimonte — you’ve survived them once; you have less to fear in there than any of us. What do you say?'
The bandit chieftain smiled. 'I am yours to command, Lord Valentine.'
'Good. And you, Lisamon?'
'Of course, my lord.'
'Then we have a party of seven explorers. We’ll set out after dinner.'
'Eight explorers, my lord,' said Ermanar quietly.
Valentine frowned. 'There’s scarcely any need for—'
'My lord, I swore to remain at your side until the Castle is yours again. If you go into the dead city, I go into the dead city with you. If the dangers are unreal, there is nothing to fear, and if they are real, my place is with you. Please, my lord.'
Ermanar seemed entirely sincere. His face was tense, his expression strained, but more, Valentine thought, out of concern that he might be excluded from the expedition than out of fear of what might lurk in the ruins.
'Very well,' said Valentine. 'A party of eight.' The moon was nearly full that evening, and its cold brilliant light illuminated the city in fine detail, mercilessly revealing the effects of thousands of years of abandonment in a way that the softer, more fantastical red glow of twilight had not. At the entrance, a worn and nearly illegible marker proclaimed Velalisier to be a royal historic preserve, by order of Lord Siminave the Coronal and the Pontifex Calintane. But they had ruled some five thousand years ago, and it did not seem as though much maintenance had been practiced here since their day. The stones of the two great platforms that flanked the road were cracked and uneven. In the furrows between them grew small ropy-stemmed weeds that with irresistible patience were prying the huge blocks apart: already in some places canyons were opening between block and block, wide enough for sizable shrubs to have taken root. Conceivably in another century or two a forest of twisted woody vegetation would hold possession of these platforms and the mighty square blocks would be wholly lost to view.
Valentine said, 'All this must be cleared away. I’ll have the ruins restored to the way they were before this overgrowth began to sprout. How could such neglect have been permitted?'
'No one cares about this place,' said Ermanar. 'No one will lift a finger for this place.'
'Because of the ghosts?' Valentine asked.
'Because it’s Metamorph,' Nascimonte said. 'That makes it doubly accursed.'
'Doubly?'
'You don’t know the story, my lord?'
'Tell me.'
Nascimonte said, 'This is the legend I was raised on, at any rate. When the Metamorphs ruled Majipoor, Velalisier was their capital, oh, twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago. It was the greatest city on the planet. Two or three million of them lived here, and from all over Alhanroel came people of the outlying tribes, bringing tribute. They held Shapeshifter festivals on top of these platforms, and every thousand years they held a special festival, a superfestival, and to mark each of those they built a pyramid, so the city was at least seven thousand years old. But evil took hold here. I don’t know what sort of things a Metamorph would regard as evil, but whatever they were, they were practiced here. This was the capital city of all abominations. And the Metamorphs of the provinces grew disgusted, and then they grew outraged, and one day they marched in here and smashed the temples and pulled down most of the city walls and destroyed the places where the evils were practiced and drove the citizens into exile and slavery. We know they weren’t massacred, because there’s been plenty of treasure-digging here — I’ve done a little of it myself, as you know — and if there were a few million skeletons buried here, they’d have been found. So the place was torn apart and abandoned, long before the first humans came here, and a curse was put on it. The rivers that fed the city were dammed and diverted. The entire plain became a desert. And for fifteen thousand years no one has lived here except the ghosts of those who died when the city was destroyed.'
'Tell the rest of it,' said Ermanar.
Nascimonte shrugged. 'That’s all I know, mate.'
'The ghosts,' Ermanar said. 'Those who haunt here. Do you know how long they’re fated to wander the ruins? Until Metamorphs rule Majipoor again. Until the planet is returned to them, and the last of us are made into slaves. And then Velalisier will be rebuilt on the old site, grander ever than it was before, and it’ll be reconsecrated as the Shapeshifter capital, and the spirits of the dead finally will be released from the stones that hold them trapped here.'
'They’ll cling to the stones a long time, then,' said Sleet. 'Twenty billion of us and just a handful of them, living in the jungles — what kind of a threat is that?'
Ermanar said, 'They’ve waited eight thousand years already, since Lord Stiamot broke their power. They’ll wait eight thousand more, if they have to. But they dream of Velalisier reborn, and they won’t give up that dream. Sometimes in sleep I’ve listened to them, planning for the day when the towers of Velalisier rise again, and it frightens me. That’s why I don’t like to be here. I feel them watching over the place — I can feel their hatred all around us, like something in the air, something invisible but real—'
'So this city is accursed by them and holy to them both at once,' Carabella said. 'Small wonder we have trouble comprehending how their minds work!'
Valentine wandered off down the path. The city awed him. He tried to imagine it as it had been, a kind of prehistoric Ni-moya, a place of majesty and opulence. And now? Lizards with beady clicking eyes scuttered from rock to rock. Weeds grew thick in the grand ceremonial boulevards. Twenty thousand years! What would Ni- moya look like in twenty thousand years? Or Pidruid, or Piliplok, or the fifty great cities on the slopes of Castle Mount? Were they building here on Majipoor a civilization that would endure forever, as the civilization of the old mother-world Earth was said to endure? Or, he wondered, would wide-eyed tourists someday prowl the shattered ruins of the Castle and the Labyrinth and the Isle, trying to guess what significance they had had to the ancients? We have done well enough so far, Valentine told himself, thinking back over the thousands of years of peace and stability. But now dissonances were breaking through; the ordered pattern of things had been disrupted; there was no telling what might befall. The Metamorphs, the defeated and evicted Metamorphs whose misfortune it had been to possess a world desired by other and stronger folk, might yet have the last laugh.
Suddenly he halted. What was that sound ahead? A footfall? And a flicker of shadow against the rocks? Valentine peered tensely into the darkness before him. An animal, he thought. Something nocturnal slithering around in search of a meal. Ghosts don’t have shadows, do they? Do they? There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts here, Valentine thought. There are no ghosts anywhere.
But all the same—
Cautiously he edged forward a few steps. Too dark here, too many avenues of tumbledown structures leading off to every side. He had laughed at Ermanar; but Ermanar’s fears had somehow insinuated themselves into his imagination. He had fantasies of austere mysterious Metamorphs gliding between the fallen buildings just beyond his vision — phantoms half as old as time — forms without bodies, shapes without substance—
And then footsteps, unmistakable footsteps, behind him—
Valentine whirled. Ermanar was trotting after him, that was all.
'Wait, my lord!'
Valentine allowed him to catch up. He forced himself to relax, though his fingers, strangely, were trembling. He put his hands behind his back.
'You ought not go off by yourself,' Ermanar said. 'I know you make light of the dangers I imagine here, but those dangers might yet exist. You owe it to us all to take more care of your safety, my lord.'
The others rejoined him, and they continued on, slowly and in silence, through the moonlit ruins. Valentine said nothing of what he had thought he had seen and heard. Surely it had been only some animal. And shortly animals appeared: some sort of small apes, perhaps akin to forest-brethren, that nested in the fallen buildings and several times caused startlement as they went scrambling over the stones. And nocturnal mammals of a lower kind, mintuns or droles, darted swiftly through the shadows. But did apes and droles, Valentine wondered, make sounds like footfalls?
For more than an hour the eight moved deeper into the ruins. Valentine stared warily into the recesses and caverns, studying the pools of blackness with care.
As they passed through the fragments of a collapsed basilica, Sleet, who had gone off a short way by himself, jogged back in distress to tell Valentine, 'I heard something strange to one side, in there.'
'A ghost, Sleet?'
'It might be, for all I know. Or simply a bandit.'
'Or a rock-monkey,' Valentine said lightly. 'I’ve heard all kinds of noises.'
'My lord—'
'Are you catching Ermanar’s terrors now?'
'I think we have wandered here long enough, my lord,' said Sleet in a low, taut voice.
Valentine shook his head. 'We’ll keep close watch on dark corners. But there’s more to see here.'
